Pictures shot dead-on and then arranged in rows or grids comprise almost every contribution to “Typologien,” a survey of 20th-century German photography at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. No horizon line is even mildly crooked, and all fall where they ought to—in the picture’s bottom third—or else are eliminated by way of a backdrop or an aerial view.
That’s not surprising; Germans are famous for their love of rules, plenty of which, when it comes to photography, they invented themselves. But the show, curated by Suzanne Pfeffer of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), emphasizes the beliefs underpinning these rules and the motivation behind the formal decision-making. It’s a refreshing return to form at a moment when photography criticism and exhibitions are placing outsized emphasis on content, a healthy reminder that ethics and aesthetics have long been seen as one and the same.
The show begins with plant pictures by Karl Blossfeldt, Lotte Jacobi and Hilla Becher; these continue the work of German Naturalists who, in the 18th century, saw art and science as one. Right off the bat we see one of the problems inherent in typologizing: Becher’s black backgrounds, incongruous with the uneven light on her flowers and leaves, are so dark and flat that it’s obvious they were manipulated in the darkroom. Her attempt at “objectivity” privileges perfect pictures over naturalistic ones, ideal specimens over ones randomly chosen. Efforts to remove the human hand from pictures can often mean more manipulation, not less.
Amid so many perfect plant pictures, Thomas Struth’s photo of a sunflower just beginning to unfurl stands out with its awkwardly clenched petals. Its more conventionally beautiful stem-mate is blurry and cut off by a corner. Titled Small Closed Sunflower-No° 18 (1992), the photo invites more looking than the other flowers in Struth’s row, which, with their dew drops and use of a macro lens, feel a lot like screensavers: boring in their beauty.
Andreas Gursky offers this section’s grand floral finale with Untitled XVIII (2015), an aerial view of flowers planted in astonishingly neat rows. The print is so large that the subject is defamiliarized, looking more like a painting than a photograph. Gursky’s photography doesn’t render a subject more understandable but, rather, more enigmatic.
Gursky and Struth, like several artists in the show, studied with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. (Hilla, his wife, was not officially employed there, but tellingly, many artists describe themselves as students of “the Bechers.”) The show borrows its title, “Typologien,” from the couple’s major series, shown in the exhibition’s center. It comprises grids of images of water towers and buildings shot from multiple angles. Each view is carefully calculated and evenly spaced, the building always dead-center in the frame.
Unsurprisingly, the work of the Bechers’ students betray both influence and rebellion. Sybille Bergmann cleverly used her teachers’ approach on a building’s interior, photographing every living room in one apartment complex. Each room has the same layout, each picture the same lighting from the same window; what stands out amid the monotony are the personal touches that make a house a home. On view opposite the Bechers’ “Typologien” series, Bergmann’s photos exude warm humanity—no small feat for a gray grid.
On the same wall, Candida Höfer takes on specimens like her forebearers, but emphasizes their context instead of burning it black. Her photos of lone animals in zoos emphasize the solitude and squalor any organism might endure when displaced from its habitat for human study. Höfer includes a giraffe—its neck looming among painted clouds—and a mournful Moo Deng doppelganger: a baby hippo all shiny and sad. The artist had never especially excited me before, but contextualized here, it was evident that her retort to all the typologizing was essential.
Essential because in Germany, of all places, typologizing had horrendous consequences. On view in a smaller gallery upstairs is a major series of portraits by August Sander, who set out to photograph every “type” of person in the Weimar Republic in the 20th century, beginning in 1911. His project is the show’s largest in volume and impact—the Bechers drew much influence from him—though he never finished the 600 portraits he set out to take, and lost plenty to fires and Nazis. Sander was interested in physiognomy—what the structure of a face might reveal about a person’s character—which might seem a foreboding progenitor of Nazi eugenics. But the Nazis banned Sander’s project, arresting his son Erich, who died in prison, and drafting his other son Gunther, who fought for the wrong side of history. For many artists, the World Wars would destroy any faith in rationality, but Sander clung to his belief in photography’s neutrality and the importance of documents, continuing to photograph rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.
Amid his many portraits—each exuding pathos and individuality, all hard to typologize without the aid of captions—I found myself tiptoeing around every corner, wondering if I’d see a Nazi, and if I’d recognize him when I did. First I wondered this of the art and then of life, past and then present.
From Sander, the show manages to gently ease us to lighter, even funny work, first with pictures from the 1980s by Christian Borchert, showing East German families full of character posing in their living rooms. Adjacent to those are Struth’s big color pictures of fancy families that feel considerably more lifeless and staged, among them Gerhard Richter’s quartet. Next is a row of ears that Isa Genzken photographed, then blew up; big and headless, they look positively strange. And then a big laugh before things get dark again: Rosemarie Trockel, the funniest German, tries the Bechers’ many-angle move on a few dogs who, sitting and even smiling for her camera, must have been very good boys.
The last room is devoted to work by Richter, ominously enclosed. Inside is part of his famed “Atlas” series (begun in the 1960s), with a selection focused on harrowing scenes from the Holocaust. Richter grouped and arranged these images on large sheets, emphasizing the sheer quantity of them; there is more awfulness on view than one can take.
I happened to enter the room as two children, speaking Italian, were seeing these images seemingly for the first time. They had many questions. Linguistically, I could only kind of follow, but on another level, I understood.
It made me want to say this: photography, as an art form, seems stuck right now, left adrift in the wake of abundant criticism that the camera is inherently violent and extractive, burdened by uneven power dynamics—all of which is true. Pictures of mass graves and death camps in “Typologien” are no exception; looking at them feels kind of wrong, very uncomfortable. But I’m glad those kids saw them, despite the knot in my stomach while watching them see, a knot that has returned as I write. I think now of pictures of Gaza and the way they show us what colonialism has probably always looked like, only much of it took place before photography was invented. Would pictures have helped then? It’s hard to know, but it does seem certain that metaphoric violence has nothing on the real thing.
