Young Farmers (photograph)

The picture depicts three young men standing in a empty landscape, wearing fine suits, hats and canes. All the three men are still and facing the camera, being caught on their action of going to a dance in a nearby village. Despite the title, the picture doesn't actually depicts real farmers. Two of the men worked in an iron ore mine and the other at the mine's office. They all would fight in the World War I, who started the same year, and one of them would die there. Their fashionable clothing and posture seems to give them a higher social status than they actually had.

The J. Paul Getty Museum website describes the picture: “Perhaps most striking about this portrait of three farmers walking along a country road on their way to a dance is their formal dress: each wears a hat and suit and carries a walking stick", “This formal appearance removes them from the reality of their occupations. Each man is seen from the side, glancing over his shoulder at the photographer; they stop only for a moment before continuing on their journey.”[3]

Art critic John Berger wrote the book The Suit and the Photograph (1980), based on this photograph. He states: "The date is 1914. The three young men belong, at the very most, to the second generation who ever wore such suits in the European countryside. Twenty or 30 years earlier, such clothes did not exist at a price which peasants could afford."

The photograph inspired the novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), by American novelist Richard Powers.

There are prints of the photograph at the August Sander Archiv, Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, in Cologne, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, in Hamburg, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.[4][5][6]