As I get older, the picture keeps changing. In 2005, I thought, This is us. These days, I think, We were just kids. Seeing that picture every day helps remind me that in another fifteen years, I will see pictures of us from 2020 and think, Look at everything those two didn’t know.

There is one other photograph I see almost every day: It’s a print of a picture taken by the photographer August Sander initially titled Young Farmers, 1914, but later known as Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Sander took many photographs that he called Young Farmers for his massive, never-finished project People of the 20th Century, which sought to photograph all sorts of people in Germany, from aristocrats to circus performers to soldiers. But this picture is probably the best known of them all. I first learned about it from Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which I read in college. Powers later wrote an autobiographical novel in which a young computer programmer becomes obsessed with the picture and abandons his career to write about it. I, too, have become obsessed with the picture. I spent years working to track down the biographies and other extant portraits of the boys depicted in the photograph.*

There’s so much to love about this picture. I love how the young men are looking over their shoulders, as if they barely have time to pause for the camera before going toward the dance and the rest of their lives. Their feet are in the mud, but their heads are in the sky, which is not a bad metaphor for being twenty. And their expressions capture the way you feel when you’re with your best friends in your nicest clothes.

The clothes themselves are also fascinating. As the art critic John Berger wrote, “The three young men belong, at the very most, to the second generation who ever wore such suits in the European countryside. Twenty or thirty years earlier, such clothes did not exist at a price which peasants could afford.” Industrialization combined with mass media like films and magazines meant that urban fashion was now available, and attractive, to young people in rural Europe.

But there’s also tension in the picture. The farmers’ dandy-like poses with cigarettes and jaunty canes are strangely incongruent with the pastoral landscape in the background. Also, their heads are sort of being cut off by the horizon line, which turns out to be tragically resonant, because when the picture was taken, the three farmers could not have known that they were also on their way to World War I. The photograph was made shortly before the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Soon, Germany would be at war, and the same industrialization that made those suits possible would mass-produce weapons far deadlier than any the world had previously seen.

And so, for me, it’s a picture about knowing and not knowing. You know you’re on your way to a dance, but don’t know you’re on your way to a war. The picture is a reminder that you never know what will happen to you, to your friends, to your nation. Philip Roth called history “the relentless unforeseen.” He said that history is where “everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” In the faces of these young farmers, we glimpse how profoundly unexpected the coming horror was. And that reminds us there is also a horizon we cannot see past.

* * *

I have a picture from January of 2020, taken inside a house. I stand arm in arm with four friends. Below us, our kids—eight of them—are tangled in a joyful pile, their shared hug having collapsed into a scrum the moment before the picture was taken. Nobody is wearing a mask. In January of 2020, the picture made me laugh. By July, not so much. “History is merely a list of surprises,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

So that’s how I always read the picture—the farmers are symbols of a precarious historical moment. They are reminders that I, too, would in time be surprised by history, and that a picture, though static, keeps changing as its viewers change. As Ana?s Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

* * *

Young Farmers is not only a work of art; it is also a historical document, depicting actual people. The boy on the left is Otto Krieger, born in 1894. He knew August Sander, because Sander had photographed Otto and his family three years earlier. The boy in the middle, August Klein, had also been previously photographed by Sander, but the negatives of those pictures, along with thirty thousand other Sander negatives, were destroyed during World War II.

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.

It’s silly to make broad conclusions about human beings from a single frame. Sander himself noted of his subjects, “I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five hundredths of a second of that person’s lifetime. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life.”

Still, I can’t help but imagine the moments before and after. I wonder what they talked about as they walked. I wonder if they had a good time, how late they stayed out, who they danced with. We know it was Saturday, summertime. We know they were out of the mine, in the light. And we know that it must’ve been one of the last dances they attended together, because the war was only weeks away.

Soon, all three boys were called to serve in the German armed forces. Otto and August were placed in the same regiment and sent to Belgium to fight. In January of 1915, only a few months after the Young Farmers photo, August Klein sent home this picture from snowy Belgium: Klein stands fifth from right; Krieger kneels beneath him.