“[The late 1920s and 1930s is] a moment when the questions of meaning, of portrait, of type are all in flux. People are struggling to find, What are the qualities that pick us out as human? Is it to attribute these to souls? Or to race? To work? All of these are beginning to fail and unravel in different ways. [...] But I think of Sander’s project ultimately as a project of confronting what it is to be human in a time when that was coming under immense duress.”
From People of the Twentieth Century: Group II, Portfolio 12, Photograph 3