ART REVIEWS : Different Worlds, Dramatic Visions : Getty Museum: ‘Faces of the German People’ showcases Cologne photographer August Sander, whose democratic lens was anathema to the Third Reich.

In 1927, 51-year-old artist August Sander selected 60 prints from his ongoing photographic series “Man of the 20th Century” for a debut exhibition at a museum in Cologne, Germany, the ancient city where he had lived for nearly two decades, and where he would remain until his death in 1964.

Since the end of World War I, Sander had turned his camera toward the creation of a monumental photographic survey of the German citizenry, selected from all classes, professions, trades and political groups--an astonishing “atlas of types,” as the historian Beaumont Newhall was to describe them, and which the artist had planned eventually to publish in 20 volumes. The German people were photographed with a uniform straightforwardness--whether parliamentarian or painter, Gypsy or dwarf, postman or taxi driver--often utilizing a wide aperture that made the sitter appear crisp and the background a hazy blur.

Now, curator Weston Naef has made another selection of 60 Sander prints, this time for a debut exhibition drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extraordinary collection of 1,276 photographs by the artist--the largest Sander holdings outside Germany. “August Sander: Faces of the German People” makes for a richly absorbing show, while also deftly complementing two other notable exhibitions in Southern California.

One is the much-celebrated “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wherein was chronicled the same political persecution of artistic expression that in 1934 brought a sudden halt to Sander’s ambitious project. Sander had published only one of his planned volumes when the Nazis confiscated and destroyed all the unsold books, the printing plates and some 40,000 negatives. They recognized--correctly--the threat to Nazi ideology posed by Sander’s brilliantly developed aesthetic.

Not only didn’t his portraits rapturously idealize their subjects, neither did they merely describe the “types” of people that took their turn posing before the lens. Instead, his photographs democratized. As much as it privileged politicians, police officers and good bourgeois citizens, Sander’s camera privileged derelicts, carnival performers and the physically different. All humanity was rendered equal and specific before the eye of the photographer--a position simply intolerable to the maintenance and expansion of fascist authority.

The other current show to which the Getty presentation might usefully be referred is called “Typologies,” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (through June 2). An exhibition of contemporary photography, it demonstrates the resonant importance of Sander’s precedent to recent art.

“Typologies” examines the quasi-scientific sorting and cataloguing of types of ordinary visual information common to the work of nine contemporary photographers. Among them are the German duo, Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose conscious debt to their countryman is well-known; Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, all students of the Bechers at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf; and Judy Fiskin, who works in Los Angeles and whose connection to Sander is indirect--namely, through her study of the photographs of Walker Evans, himself a devotee of Sander’s art.

Weston Naef doesn’t say so in the brochure that accompanies the Getty show, but his exhibition may well have meant to allude to Sander’s continuing importance to photography today. The first pictures encountered in the gallery are nine portraits of “Persecuted Jews,” made secretly in 1938, which have been hung in a grid-pattern, three photographs high and three wide. Naef’s installation design is here identical to the signature format typically employed by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Where the Bechers’ pictures focus on brute aspects of the industrial landscape--the typology of modern forms repeated in the construction of blast furnaces, water towers, workers’ housing, etc.--Sander’s “Persecuted Jews” focus on the benign faces of men and women, young and old. Each is photographed singly, seated in a chair, hands folded in the lap and in three-quarter view. This formal repetition, as with all Sander’s groups of photographs, functions in a surprisingly contradictory way. A sense of uniform equality is bestowed on disparate subjects, emphasizing their commonality; simultaneously, the uniqueness and individuality of each human being is underscored.

The profoundly poignant beauty that marks Sander’s portraits comes as much from what is not seen in the photographs, as from what is. When you look at the “Persecuted Jews,” you can’t help but be deeply aware of all those who were not photographed, of those untold members of a common class whose lives were lived beyond the camera’s range. Doubt and ambiguity are built into the image, as each photograph subtly poses a question: “Why this one and not that one?” Inevitably, the presence in a Sander photograph of a musician, a waitress or a bricklayer’s mate evokes the absence of all other musicians, waitresses or bricklayers’ mates.

Within this paradoxical aspect of his work lies the indelible brilliance of Sander’s art. Sander recognized that the medium of photography possessed a fundamentally useful capacity. No single photograph exists autonomously. Each finds its authentic meaning through its relationship to all others. Therein lay the poetic power of “Man in the 20th Century.”

A further implication of this awareness was suggested in the introduction to “Antlitz der Zeit,” or “The Face of the Time,” as the first volume of the projected 20-volume set was titled. (A copy is in the Getty show.) The writer Alfred Doblin succinctly described Sander’s practice as “comparative photography.” These two words remain among the most insightful commentaries on the artist’s genius.

Like comparative literature, comparative photography forced something new--and important--into the relationship between a viewer and a work of art. Anyone who would truly know Sander’s photography is prevented from passively consuming any single image as “authoritative.” Comparative photography required of the viewer an active consideration of options posed, choices made and differences registered by each and every photograph. Within this dynamic, politically trenchant quality of Sander’s art lies its haunting power, as well as its significance for the present day.

As Sander once aptly put it, he had no intention “either to criticize or to describe these people, but to create a piece of history with my pictures.” Conceptually, these multiple, democratizing photographs are to our own century what singular, aristocratic likenesses by court painters were to pre-modern eras.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, to July 28; parking reservations required: (213) 458-2003; closed Monday.