“Here too a single image—the Streichholzverkäufer [Match-seller]—is crucial: as the literally grounded (just shy of unemployed) disfigured proletarian supplement to the remainder of the portraits, his image exposes the fragility, the impending dissolution in 1929, of the world of banking, publishing, administration, and industry that surrounds it. As such, in its difference, it functions via a logic of montage to both destabilize and give meaning to the portfolio as a whole.”
From People of the Twentieth Century: Group IV, Portfolio 27, Photograph 9