Beginning in the early 1920s, August Sander labored at an epic project titled People of the Twentieth Century—a collective portrait of German citizenry covering all classes and professions, from aristocrats to beggars, artists to military men, farmers to lawyers, and bakers to bankers. Although Sander’s portrait style may have seemed artless at the time, and might still seem straightforward at first glance, his pictures were carefully considered, both unflinchingly true to life and sympathetic. The formal simplicity of such pictures and Sander’s typological approach to his project were highly influential on subsequent generations of photographers.