From the mid-1920s until the end of his life, August Sander photographed individuals and groups of people in his native Germany, classifying them according to their occupations and social positions in a monumental documentary project known as People of the 20th Century. The seventh and final group in this project, entitled ‘The Last People’, depicts figures excluded from everyday working life: the ill, the disabled and the dead. The title ‘The Last People’ indicates the low priority these people were given within social hierarchies. This photograph of two blind girls is one of a series of pictures of blind children and adults that Sander took during a visit to The Institute for the Blind in Düren, near his home town of Cologne, around the year 1930. Its subject clearly illustrates the humanitarian concerns that underpinned Sander’s social-documentary photography.