Walter Sanders (born Walter Suessmann) was a German émigré photojournalist. In 1938 he arrived in New York, where he worked from 1939 until the end of his life for the photo agency Black Star and, from 1944, for Life magazine. He began his career as a photographer in Germany and was able to follow his passion after emigration to New York. He moved house several times in New York and lived in hotels for a time. During 1945, while working for Life, he lived in Los Angeles and, from 1946 until 1949/50, employed by Life's European branch, travelled to France, Italy and Germany. It was the first time he had been back to Germany since his emigration. Today, a great many of his photographs are saved in the Black Star archive at the Ryerson Image Center.

Walter Sanders came to photography via his previous job as a publicist and sales manager for a German industrial manufacturing company. Before that, he had attended high school in Gera and studied economics and history in Berlin. According to a biographical questionnaire he completed, he spent three years with the mechanical engineering company Orenstein and Koppel in Berlin working on a narrow-gauge railroad, and nine years with R. Dolberg, a factory for field and industrial railways as well as wagon and switch construction in Berlin. On his business trips around Europe (Spain, Romania, Finland and Portugal) he always took a camera with him and taught himself photography. His passion for photography grew and during the late 1920s and early 1930s he worked as a photo reporter in Germany. He also began photographing his daughter Ursula and was soon producing little photo stories featuring her and his wife Elisabeth Lüders-Suessmann on the streets in Berlin. While the child had fun posing in front of the camera, Sanders captured her natural and expressive gestures, playing with shadow and light and employing a visual approach that followed the aesthetics of the New Vision. Several photos were stamped “Aufnahme: Walter Süssmann, Berlin Charlottenburg 4, Wilmersdorferstr. 83”. During the 1930s his photographs were published in several magazines owned by the Ullstein and Rudolf Mosses publishing houses and sold by the Neofot photo agency to be reproduced in such magazines as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung(BIZ) and Gebrauchsgraphik, as well as in the “Photo-Spiegel” section of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper and the Das deutsche Lichtbild yearbook in 1930. In the 1930s also the Ukraine illustrator Vladimir Bobritsky (Bobri), who already emigrated in the 1920s to New York, contributed with an advertisement of the department store Saks to the Gebrauchsgraphik.

Walter Sanders arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1937 and later travelled to New York, where he stayed at 106 Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, a borough where many German Jewish émigrés lived and where the émigré photographer Fred Stein had an apartment. He arrived in New York with a business visitor visa, which only allowed him to stay until 8 July, 1938, so in July he travelled to Cuba for re-entering the U.S. and applying for a permanent visa. His first assignment with the Black Star photo agency was in 1938/39, and his first image published in Life magazine in 1939.

The name “Echo Inc.” with the address 947 Madison Avenue found on letterheads and on the back of some photographs, suggests that, between 1937 to 1939, in addition to his work for Black Star and Life, he also tried to run his own photo agency to earn money to send back to his family (Kornfeld 2021, 252). Shortly after his arrival in New York he also had to sell his photographic equipment to earn money. On joining Black Star in 1939, however, despite the fact that 50 percent of the fees he earned from assignments remained with the agency, he was able restart his career, buy new equipment and also send money back to Germany. He had left behind in Germany his daughter Ursula and his ex-wife Elisabeth Suessmann (Lüders), as well as his sister Charlotte and mother Paula Suessmann. As a Jew married to a non-Jew, the only way to save the life of his wife and daughter had been to divorce Elizabeth before his emigration in 1937 to the US. The plan had been that the rest of the family would follow him, but this never happened and his mother and sister were victims of the Holocaust.Thanks to a project by Frederike Fechtner Stolpersteine, an account of their life and tragic end is conserved in Stralsund.

Walter Sanders' career as a photo reporter is that of a man who restarted from scratch in his mid-forties and succeeded with passion. After joining Black Star in 1939, where he became staff photographer in 1941, he worked as a freelance photographer for Life until 1944, when he became a staff photographer on the magazine, where he remained until his retirement in 1961, after which he continued to work on a contract basis for several more years. On January 1941 he applied to change his name to Walter Sanders, thereby disappearing his previous identity. Most of his photos until that time were signed Walt Sanders. In 1944 he began the process of naturalisation to become a US citizen with the help of Wilson Hicks, the executive editor of Life magazine. As Sanders was in line to become a staff photographer in 1944 and would be producing photo stories covering industrial and military activity, and since the country was at war, he needed to become an American citizen. Besides Walter Sanders, other European émigrés as Fritz Henle, Fritz Goro and Andreas Feininger were also on the staff of the magazine. Letters between Sanders and Hicks reveal that the two men had a good relationship and that Sanders' work for the magazine was greatly appreciated. This was reflected in his annual salary increases from 1944, when his salary rose from $7,600 to $9,000 in 1946. This was more than he had been earning with Black Star and also  more than Josef Breitenbach was earning in his teaching job at the New School for Social Research. However, Sanders lived a somewhat peripatetic life, spending brief periods of time at a number of different addresses in New York, in furnished apartments and hotels, his post forwarded while he was on his travels to Life or Black Star office addresses.

Much of Walter Sanders' immense output of stories and images that appeared in Life have been preserved in scrapbooks and published collections, allowing them to be enjoyed even today. In the years between 1939 and 1945, his photographs were published in more than 100 issues of Life. And between 1939 and 1947 his images graced more than 18 Life covers, an impressive record for a photo reporter. Sanders' first Life cover was published on 26 June, 1939 to accompany the reportage “College fads inspire summer resort fashion”. One of his first assignments and probably also his first image to be published in Life was on the occasion of the World’s Fair (Life, 13 March 1939). Over the years, the World’s Fair provided a starting point for a number of émigré photographers and artists in New York. These included Rolf Tietgens, Ruth Bernhard,, Ernest Nash,, Andreas Feininger, Carola Gregor as well as Lilo Hess.

Walter Sanders was a flexible photographer, capable of creating picture stories on a variety of different topics and in a variety of contexts and he travelled around the U.S. recording special events and themes. Between 1941 and 1945 his photo stories were often within the context of the war and life on the home front. This can also be seen in the photographs of his Black Star colleagues, the Austrian émigré Lilly Joss and Fritz Henle. Sanders' photo stories all reveal an empathy and closeness with his subjects and an attempt to capture human life and emotions in neutral scenes.

The scrapbooks reveal that in the early days of his emigration his pictures were also published in European and international magazines. Between 1939 and 1942 his images appeared in the Dutch magazine Billed Bladet, the Norwegian Bilder Gyldendal, Hjemmet, the Swedish Se, the French Regard, the Suisse Schweizer Illustrierte, Sie und Er, the British Picture Post and Lilliput, and Germany's Die Koralle.

The job of a photojournalist was to meet the requirements of agencies and magazines by creating vivid and dynamic stories with which the readership could identify. Although in some case the pictures were arranged in line with his technical and visual training, Walter Sanders achieved a spontaneous and natural character in his work. It was important to him to show his personal handwriting and conception. Unlike his photographs in the Ryerson Image Center collection, those published alongside Life stories can be appreciated within the context for which they were created. An analysis of his dense and impressive body of work identifies a number of conceptual and aesthetic stylistics that run through it like a connecting thread, making all his images seem as one. First, Walter Sanders was a very precise and detailed observer who saw his environment in conceptual as well as visual arrangements. This can be seen in all the genres he worked in, from portraits to landscapes, to urban scenes and still lifes. Often the content level together with the visual level incorporates environmental conditions into the conception of his pictures.

In addition, New Vision aesthetics, which, especially in the Weimer Republic had transformed conventional ways of seeing – with the use of sharp contrasts, unusual perspectives and the play of light and shadow – are characteristic of Walter Sanders' photographs. All of these elements and more can be found in his early photographs before he left Europe and are steadily developed in the images he created in the United States. Most of the time he worked with Rolleiflex and Leica cameras for black and white images and used a Speed Graphic camera for colour shots.
The play and arrangement of graphical forms and patterns can be seen in the Parade Synchronized Swimmers
and the Seating Mass, both taken at the World’s Fair, as well as in a New York street view featuring the Chrysler Building. The unusual sloping roof of the Chrysler Building is framed in a grid-like manner by a kind of archway / driveway. With his camera, he constructed an exact section in which the cross connection runs exactly parallel to the lattice structure of the Chrysler Building's window, dividing the building into three sections. The high-contrast play and the appearance of urban industrial elements is also found in another image, which casts a glance at a New York City house façade with remnants of an old advertisement. Another highly unusual representation of a familiar city landmark is his close-up image of the hand, and the viewing platform, of the Statue of Liberty. This image was also published in the Argentine magazine MUNDO argentino (June 1941). The visually and graphically trained eye as well as the mastery of photographic techniques, can be grasped in another image taken inside Grand Central Station.

Sanders produced a number of portrait series, including of Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward Steichen and the Italian émigré illustrator, painter and publisher Ludwig Bemelmann, shown here at his desk and in the act of the drawing. These portraits of émigré artists are reminiscent of similar portraits by the émigré photographers Hermann Landshoff, Fred Stein, Trude Fleischmann, Lotte Jacobi, Ruth Jacobi, Lilly Joss Reich and Ernest Nash.

In 1945, while working for Life's California office, Walter Sanders lived in Los Angeles at 8561 Lookout Mountain Avenue. In January 1941 he married for a second time, to Lisbeth de Morinni, whom he divorced in 1946. In a letter dated November 1945, while he was staying in Los Angeles, Sanders expressed the desire to go on a photo assignment to Europe, to show American readers the situation there and how it should never happen again, and the following month he received news of his estranged daughter Ursula Suessmann in Germany. Since his emigration in 1937, father and daughter had not seen each other and even contact by letter had been impossible after the U.S. entered the war.

In spring 1946 the planned European tour began with a stop off at the Time Life office in Paris. During the next three and a half years he was stationed not only in Paris, but also in Berlin and Bonn, creating photo series and travelling on commissions to other parts of Europe. At the time, this was the longest tour of duty (3½ years) in the history of Life magazine. Sanders' photo stories were the first to appear in Life after the war covering a variety of political, social as well as historical and cultural topics while focusing on post-war life and the reconstruction of the cities in the different Allied sectors. At times he was required to wear uniform so as not to be identified as a photographer. For the reportage “The Road Back To Berlin”, for which he also wrote the text, he followed the trail of his own Berlin past (Life, 10 November 1946). Other of his photo stories were “Renaissance Man” (Life, 3 March 1947); “Pre-Election Report On Italy” (Life, 12 April 1948), “Report On The Occupation” (Life, 10 February 1947), “Three Weeks In Tito’s Yugoslavia” (12 July 1948) and “Western Germany” (Life, 26 August 1946). The images of his native country show the aftermath of World War II, recreating important historical and socio-political moments in the story of Germany and the world. Reading the correspondence between Walter Sanders and his daughter during his stay in Europe, it is not clear whether or not he managed a reunion with his daughter between his assignments. One person he probably did meet in Germany was Alfred Kornfeld, the son of Kurt Kornfeld, one of Black Star’s co-founders. Sanders had been a friend of the Kornfeld family since his first assignments for the agency in 1939. An image exists of Alfred Kornfeld and Walter Sanders sitting on a rock in New Rochelle, where the Kornfeld family, as well as the two other founders of Black Star, Kurt Safranski and Ernest Mayer, lived until the 1950s (Kornfeld 2021, 295). It was probably Kurt Kornfeld who took this photograph.

After his return to New York in 1950, Walter Sanders resumed working for the Life office there. He lived in an apartment at 114 East 40th Street. As he wrote in a letter to his daughter, it was a furnished two-room apartment on the top floor of an old 10-storey building with the elevator directly in front of his door, comfortable but noisy. It was located in Midtown Manhattan, close to Grand Central Station and to the offices of Life and Black Star. During his career as a photojournalist Sanders' images appeared not only in Life, but also in other magazines such as Fortune, Time, House & Garden, Vogue, Arts&Decoration, Everyday Photography, Parade, Herald Tribune, Picture Post, Washington Post, Everbody’s, Popular Photography, as well as in the U.S. Camera Annual Yearbook in 1941 and 1943 (where also images by émigré photographers such as Ruth Staudinger, Trude Fleischmann, Fritz Henle, Andreas Feininger, Ylla and Lisette Model were shown). Walter Sanders was also represented in the worldwide touring The Family of Men exhibition organised by Edward Steichen, starting in 1951 in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. An international selection of photographers were shown at this exhibition, among also other émigrés photographers such as Marion Palfi, Andreas Feininger and Lisette Model.

During the 1950s Walter Sanders travelled several times to Europe as well as in 1954 to Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, living between trips in New York at several address (60 East 96th Street; 519 East 86th Street). In 1961 he retired as a staff photographer with Life and finally re-emigrated to Germany, where he worked for Life on a contract basis. In 1962 he moved to Munich, where he lived at Petristrasse 3 and, after 1970, at Tizianstr 35.

Although Walter Sanders carried out many assignments in Europe after his emigration, his work is today almost forgotten in Germany and his reputation as a photographer is reflected only in American books in the context of Life and Black Star. In 1983 Walter Sanders gave interviews in the context of an exhibition project Die Gleichschaltung der Bilder. Pressefotografie 1930–36 by Diethart Kerbs, in connection with which he also participated in a presentation in Berlin the same year. This was his first and last presentation at an exhibition in Germany. In 2021, Walter Sanders was mentioned in a new book about Black Star photo agency written by Phoebe Kornfeld, the granddaughter of Kurt Kornfeld.