Serial Production, Serial Photography, and the Writing of History in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Abstract
Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance is both the title of Richard Powers’ novel and of August Sander’s 1914 photograph whose haunting influence the book explores. The photograph itself was part of a larger project, “Man of the Twentieth Century,” in which Sander attempted to document the people of his native Westerwald. By photographing men and women from all walks of life, Sander thus created a typological catalogue of more than 600 photos of the German people, a part of which was later published in his book Face of our Time. Powers’ novel traces the motif of the series through the figures of August Sander and Henry Ford, as their series of photographs and series of cars serve to metaphorise both the advent of modernism and the fictions the two characters build about history. This article intends to show how Powers’ novel uncovers the stories about history that underlie Ford’s and Sander’s series. Yet the paradigm of the series maintains a linearity Powers’ prose foregoes: the historical event, just like the artifact, is to be perceived in terms of solid geometry and intersection of planes, a cross between “essayistic firmness” and “the invitation of fiction” that result in a three-dimensional object which the series fails to create.
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