Robin Odland

Face of My Time

Nearly 100 years after the famous August Sander began his quest to document 20th century German society with his initial work on the book entitled Face of Our Time, I offer a complimentary 21st century look at American Society.

In Sander’s work, he attempted to document and classify the various social strata that existed in early 20th century Germany. Broken down largely along vocational lines, he made hundreds of glorious images of classes of people such as Farmers, Landowners and Artisans. The formal structure of Sander’s classical, mostly frontal, full frame images of the human form is beyond reproach, though his notion of categorization of the human social strata is debatable.

In Face of My Time, I seek to apply the same classical approach to photographing the people around me in the 21st century. I make no attempt to classify the type of person I photograph or to allocate them to particular social strata. For me, they are simply interesting people captured in an interesting, honest and revealing manner. It is my hope that the images will become much more meaningful and rich through the absence of any constraining classification. I offer up the location in which the images were taken for context, but nothing more. I leave the details about these people, their backgrounds, social status and the amount of money they have or don’t have up to the imagination of the viewer.