August Sander: Objective Romantic
by August Sander
Halifax, NS: Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 2013
$29
Songs that Remind Us of Factories
by Danny Jacobs
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013
64 pp. $19
August Sander (1876-1964) had the bad luck of trying to be an epic, German photographer while Germany fought—twice—to make Europe its vassal. His career was bookended—and upended—by war: It’s impossible to eye his photos and not spy the shadows of contiguous horrors. His goal, to create a panoramic record of 20th century, German faces, became, accidentally, partly an epitaph to the daily life of Cologne, due to the 1942 obliteration of the medieval city by 1,000 British bombers. Usually painterly, with subtle sepia tones (not unlike Wallace MacAskill’s florid, camera seascapes of 1930s Nova Scotia), Sander’s photos can also be sharply black-and-white, issuing formidable clarity.
Both types of Sander pictorial were the subject of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (MSVUAG) exhibition, August Sander: Objective Romantic, held from 7 September to 20 October, 2013, curated by famed Halifax photographer George Steeves. Steeves’ impressions of Sander’s ambitions and frustrations unfold in an essay included in the MSVUAG exhibition catalogue, which features a selection of Sander’s works, presumably those that Steeves believes exemplify Sander’s aesthetic. However, these works also likely illuminate—Steeves’s—own practice, which is, ironically, antithetical to Sander, for Steeves questions grandeur and realism.
Arguably, Steeves has focused on showing us the body, unvarnished, even innately unlovely, in its naked glory, and on stripping away static, gender concepts—by cross-dressing or undressing his models. In contrast, Sander imbues his subjects with dignity verging on romanticism. I wager Steeves is impressed by Sander’s establishment of an air of “benign equanimity” in his subjects and his labours to carry on and preserve his art, even when “violence (is) roaring outside his own door.” Steeves is captivated, then, by Sander’s pursuit of Art for Art’s Sake. In his historical fiction that closes the slim book, Steeves writes, “Obsession is freedom … if one is driven and selfish enough.” This precept animates many great artists, whose immortality is achieved amid broken homes and broken hearts.
Steeves’s essay omits Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi-collaborationist photographer and filmmaker; yet, her post-war, African ethnographic shoots mirror Sander’s sociological archive. However, unlike Sander, she became complicit with politics, which Steeves sees as inimical to art. How fine it is that the MSVUAG has published this book, giving us access to a vital, last-century photographer and—just as importantly—suggestive insights into the “obsessions” of curator Steeves.
Songs that Remind Us of Factories is Danny Jacobs’ debut poetry collection. Raised in Riverview, N.B., and degreed in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Jacobs is the librarian of Petitcodiac, N.B. His work means the arrival of a new generation of poets, intrigued by the connective and alienating aspects of electronic communication and also experienced in the part-Babylon, part-Hell that is the call centre, a likely fiendish sort of McJob.
Jacobs wields well Dantean cum Orwellian jargon. A death results, then, not from “some crossed- / signal in the cells,” but the “quick physics / of skid and drift: a road, sun catching on chrome.” At work, making cold calls, “Pens / are contraband in the paperless environment.” Humanely, “Capital One” permits “seven minutes a shift” for “Bathroom time.” The lyrics that delve into the Newspeak of nanotechnology or describe the “neocortex fold” might be dismissed as avant-garde cliché. But a poem like “Memo from Heaven, Re: The Lesser Saints,” shows that Jacobs traces the satiric tradition of F.R. Scott: “They may bitch we’re bureaucrats… / but relate / the logistics—we’re losing millions / and need to back our first-stringers, / the go-to guys from Sunday School….”
But it’s not only the Canuck poet Scott who seems to prefigure Jacobs. One can also espy U.S. poet Robinson Jeffers and British poet Basil Bunting. Jacobs’ forward-looking poetry looks back to modernism. Though the up-to-date vocabulary snags attention, the poems about relationships must matter most: “roots, braid the soil, / grow the shaky / beginnings of a tree.”
