There is, however, one photograph of Otto Krieger and August Klein from before Young Farmers.

In this 1913 photograph, Otto (bottom row, third from left) holds crossed drumsticks, while August (bottom row, far left) holds what seems to be the same cane that appears in the Young Farmers picture. According to the journalist Reinhard Pabst, a fellow Young Farmers obsessive who found and preserved this photograph, the picture may have been taken during a “Flower Day” celebration in the spring of 1913, about a year before Sander’s famous picture.

As Sander probably knew, Otto Krieger and August Klein were not farmers. They both worked in an iron ore mine. The boy on the right of the Young Farmers photograph, August’s cousin Ewald Klein, worked in the iron mine’s office. His godson would later say that Ewald preferred office work because he didn’t like getting his hands dirty.

And so the young farmers were, in fact, two young miners and an office worker, which is to say that they were participants in the industrial economy. The iron from the mine where they worked would go toward building weapons in the coming war.

Sander himself had worked in an iron ore mine beginning when he was thirteen, so he may have felt some affinity toward these boys. The photographer Maggie Steber once noted, “Respect is the most important thing you put into your camera,” and Sander’s respect for these three subjects is evident in the picture. Ewald later said, “We all knew him back then, because he had taken photos all over the area, and he always came into the pub.”

Indeed, it was Sander’s respect for his subjects that would eventually earn the ire of the Nazi regime. Sander photographed Jewish and Roma people (one section of People of the 20th Century is devoted to “the persecuted”), and in 1934, Nazi authorities destroyed the printing blocks for a collection of Sander’s photography and burned all available copies of the book. The following year, Sander’s son, Erich, was imprisoned for being a communist. He died in prison a decade later, just months before the Second World War ended.

But we haven’t even gotten to the First World War yet. It is the summer of 1914. Erich Sander is fifteen years old.

The three young farmers who weren’t farmers lived in Dünebusch, a village of around a hundred and fifty people in the Westerwald mountains in western Germany. Back then, the village wasn’t accessible by car. To visit, Sander drove to the end of the road, and then walked his camera equipment up the mountain for miles.

Otto, August, and Ewald really were on their way to a dance, which was in a little town about a forty-five-minute walk away. Sander probably knew their route in advance and was already set up when they arrived. They paused in front of the camera, turned their heads over their shoulders, and held still.

Otto, hat cocked, cigarette in his lips, looked like the kind of trouble you wouldn’t mind getting into. August seems handsome and confident and a little bit sleepy-eyed. And then there’s Ewald, who with his tight lips and ramrod straight cane looks nervous to me.