NEW HAVEN — It’s not in the nature of photographs to be epic. Movies, novels, poems, paintings, sculpture, opera, even stage plays, all have that capacity. Photographs do not. Even blown-up very large, they stay precise, intimate, discrete. It’s intrinsic to the medium. A photograph remains confined, literally: first within a viewfinder, then within a frame. Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky might epically disagree, but their photographs are very much an exception.
Where photography can be epic, thrillingly so, is in a larger undertaking. Think of projects like the US government’s four surveys of the American West after the Civil War, Eugene Atget effectively taking visual ownership of Paris at the beginning of the last century; the Farm Security Administration sending out Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and others to document American life during the Depression; the mileage that went into making Robert Frank’s “The Americans”.
The list goes on, and at its head stands August Sander’s “People of the 20th Century.” What Sander set out to do sounds absurd — it is absurd — except that it resulted in one of the most magnificent (and influential) bodies of work in photographic history.
“August Sander’s People of the 20th Century” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 28. It includes all 619 surviving images from the project. (Several thousand were destroyed during World War II and in a subsequent house fire.)
Sander (1876-1964), who spent more than six decades working on “People of the 20th Century,” lived all his life in Germany. In its dedication to order and reliance on it well past the point of irrationality, the project feels very Teutonic. The idea was to photograph individuals in German society who exemplified types within seven larger classifications: “The Farmer,” “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Woman,” “Classes and Professions,” “The Artists,” “The City,” and “The Last People” (the ill, the elderly, the dead and dying).
The categories are like updated versions of medieval guilds, yet very much of the century proclaimed in the overall title. Many of the most indelible photographs were taken during the Weimar period — and while most of Sander’s subjects are anonymous there are also well-known artists from those years: the painter Otto Dix, the composers Paul Hindemith and Richard Strauss, the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann.
For Sander, the archetypal could take unexpected form: a birthday party, members of his own family, Germany’s then-president, Paul von Hindenburg, sharing the back seat of a touring car with its future postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (not all the photographs are posed portraits).
There are at least two instances of visual comedy. The grin worn by the bare-chested bantamweight in “Boxers” is pure slapstick. As for the Mutt-and-Jeff juxtaposition of the two soldiers in “Military Height Disparity,” it’s humor of the broadest sort. The laughter ceases, though, with the realization that Sander took it in 1915, a year into World War I. The weight of history can lay heavy on “People.” One of the “Classes and Professions” portfolios is entitled “The National Socialist.”
Portfolios is what Sander called the sub-groupings he set up within the seven classifications. “The City,” for example, includes both “Political Prisoners” — a category of aching personal significance for Sander: The Nazis killed one of his sons — and “People Who Came to My Door,” meaning peddlers, beggars, a bailiff.
The specificity of the former and randomness of the latter speak to how porous Sander’s groupings could be. As a taxonomist, he had more in common with Borges than Linnaeus. The wonder of “People” — as of people, too — is how the faces of men and women we don’t know and couldn’t otherwise identify can take on the familiarity and immediacy of intimate friends and relations.
The hod carrier’s forthright gaze in “Bricklayer” is unforgettable. No less memorable are the rustic suavity displayed by the trio of gallants in “Young Farmers” and the proud bulk of the “Pastrycook” in his chef’s whites. You’d think he was wearing ermine. That Sander’s skills at classification may have been suspect hardly matters, since his talent for finding subjects and documenting them was nearly flawless.
The photographs are arranged in grids, making for a simplicity and directness that’s at once inspired and a bit overwhelming. The placement of captions on slanted baseboards beneath each vertical row of photographs provides information without creating any visual disruption. No less elegant is the use of open spaces within each grid to indicate a switch in portfolios. The overall presentation is as clear and compelling as Sander’s photographs. The effect is of a forest of faces, and like the trees that make up a forest these faces are solid and enduring, utterly unique and silently alive.
The individual images aren’t large, ranging in size from roughly 7 inches by 8½ inches to just over 10 inches by just under 7½. The beauty of seeing them as exhibited here is being able to grasp them not just in their entirety but as an entirety.
Experienced this way, “People” announces itself as a precursor of conceptual art (not that Sander could have imagined such a thing). To cite just one example, his typologies of people look ahead — speaking of epic photographic projects — to Bernd and Hilla Bechers’ typologies of industrial structures. His influence on them is obvious.
Not as apparent, though perhaps more profound, was his influence on a more famous photographer. “August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button feather tassel or stripe,” Diane Arbus once wrote. “All odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the special shape we come in.”
So many of the faces are timeless, which becomes all the more startling in light of how so many of the appurtenances and accoutrements seen are so much of their time and place: clothes, facial hair, even job descriptions (“Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne,” from 1931). What they all share is a sense of Sander’s abiding respect for others and no less abiding curiosity about them.
Brought together like this, “People” and those who inhabit it are tantalizing, bewildering, endlessly interesting. There are so many things that photography excels at capturing: landscape, still life, public events, architecture, even outer space, and that’s just for starters. Looking at Sander’s work reminds us that nothing surpasses the camera’s affinity for the human face.
The 15 nude self-portraits in “John Coplans,” which runs at YUAG through June 14, show many parts of the photographer’s body — torso, fingers, feet — but not his face. This is crucial. These images are about a human body, not the particular person that body may have belonged to.
Coplans (1920-2003) was an old man when he took these photographs. His concern wasn’t individual identity (his) but an inexorable process (ours): how the body ages and declines yet also perseveres.
With nothing to conceal, there is much to reveal. Coplans’s flesh is saggy, baggy, craggy: Dermatology merges with geology. Scrotal might be the best description for the skin texture seen here — and, yes, Coplans’s scrotum and penis do make appearances.
Some of the photographs are very big. “Interlocking Fingers” is nearly 4 feet by just over 3 feet. Their heroic dimensions — Donald Trump would want his portraits this large — underscore how unheroic a figure they present. “Unheroic” is another word for typical, average, human.
Both Sander’s and Coplans’s photographs are black and white. That makes Denise Scott Brown’s Kodachromes look all the more luscious by comparison. “Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs” runs through July 3 at the Yale Architecture Gallery, across the street and around the corner from YUAG.
Now 94, Scott Brown is one of the most celebrated living architects. “Encounters” pays tribute to that career while also very happily attending to her photographic avocation. It’s a highly varied exhibition. In addition to an 80-image slide show, there are 32 photographs by or of her. That they’re unframed and unmatted gives them a casual, inviting appearance. There are also sketches, plans, an “Unfit for Habitation” notice from the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, from 1968, and three sets of tableware Scott Brown designed with her second husband, Robert Venturi.
Such range raises a funny question: What category might Sander have assigned Scott Brown to? Candidates include “The Woman,” “Classes and Professions,” “The Artists,” “The City,” and “The Last People” (simply by dint of age). It’s a testament to such an impressive life and career that she’d have given pause even to someone so categorically inclined.
AUGUST SANDER’S PEOPLE OF THE 20th CENTURY
JOHN COPLANS
At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through June 28 and June 14, respectively. 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu
ENCOUNTERS: DENISE SCOTT BROWN PHOTOGRAPHS
At Yale Architecture Gallery, Paul Rudolph Hall, Yale School of Architecture, 190 York St., New Haven, through July 3. 203-436-3944, www.architecture.yale.edu/exhibitions
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.