The Brooklyn Rail

Born in the context of seventeenth and eighteenth-century botany as a way to classify and order plants, the practice of typology—the idea of ranking things by type or kind—seems to have something inherently rigid and oppressive to it, as if the utter variety and beauty of the world could be reduced to neat categories. This is an impulse that necessarily turns very sinister the moment one considers that, right at the same time, the descriptive positivism that lies at the heart of the typological project also served as intellectual ammunition for Nazi eugenics and bogus race science. But if a wide-ranging survey such as Typologien: Photography in 20th-Century Germany, on view at Fondazione Prada until mid-July, shows anything, it is that even the most rigid and repetitive of conceits can be bent into the most surprising, diverse outcomes if it is approached with the right method and intent.

The exhibition opens with a selection of extreme close-ups of plants which could easily be samples of biophilic design by Karl Blossfeldt, the photographer who, with his atlas Urformen Der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature] (1928) contributed to establishing the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and, with his contemporary August Sander, turned typology into a dominant mode in German photography. Close by, some similar pictures by Lotte Jacobi taken roughly at the same time and early studies of leaves by Hilla Becher seem to suggest that the same idea executed over and over awaits the visitor ahead. However, this impression is dispelled as soon as the visitor bumps into Simone Nieweg’s wonderfully unruly images of vegetables—mostly cabbages if you care to know—as well as rundown allotments and tool sheds.

In the niches that follow on the ground floor, the photographs on view are divided between those offering a critical commentary on modernity and those which instead embrace a taste for the incongruous and the odd. Everyone will be familiar with the carefully staged photographs of industrial buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher. The placing side by side of these structures serves as a commentary on the vernacular prowess of these anonyme skulpturen (anonymous sculptures), but also a melancholy reflection on the pace at which capitalism renders things obsolete, monuments to a lost time.

Likewise, visitors will probably be familiar with Andreas Gursky’s crammed images of overflowing supermarket shelves, apartment blocks, and tulip fields. The sensory overload that his three monumental prints included here produce at different points in the exhibition might be the best expression of what Pier Paolo Pasolini called, in neo-Marxist parlance, omologazione—that is, the sort of dispiriting standardization produced by late capitalism and the commodity form more generally.

Personally, though, I found myself gravitating more toward those bodies of work that had something humorous about them, perhaps because I expected them least. Among these are Simone Nieweg’s cabbages and kohlrabies, which I have already mentioned, but also Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s studies of Spomenik-looking bus stops—a less self-serious, zanier take on the Bechers—and Candida Höfer’s wonderfully fantastical snapshots of giraffes, lions, and hippos at the Hamburg zoo. While totally quotidian, these could easily be used to illustrate a Julio Cortázar short story. Worth mentioning are also a couple of series that marry both modes, the critical and the quirky, to lampoon gender norms and the patriarchy at large: Marianne Wex’s catalogue of postures and body language (both male and female) and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Alle Kleider einer Frau [All the Clothes of a Woman] (1974).

The same kind of dynamic, alternating more serious and off-beat contributions, continues on the floor above. Different series juxtaposing family portraits, living rooms, breeds of cows, and even the beaks of great auks drive the point home that typology is not a tool to flatten the world’s multiplicity but rather a means to exalt its fundamental diversity and even provoke a sense of wonder and surprise.

However praise-worthy these photographs are, they are to some degree dwarfed, though, by the dozens of portraits of German people by August Sander, the great founding father of typology, which take up roughly half of the exhibition space. Coming mostly from Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th century), Sander’s magnum opus which was published in its final form only posthumously in 1980—they constitute an atlas or census of German society divided along different fault-lines such as gender, class, background and occupation. Far from a sterile pigeonholing exercise, these portraits are infused with both seriousness and humanism, whereby every subject is afforded their individuality and respect.

Sander’s project embraced every aspect of German society. He took portraits of Nazis and soldiers, which after World War II he included in the section “Classes and Professions.” At the same time, he added photos of political prisoners to his atlas that had been taken by his son, Erich Sander, who spent ten years in a labor camp for being a dissident and died of deliberately untreated appendicitis in 1944. What’s clear from all these photos is why the Nazis themselves were hostile to Sander’s work—and even confiscated and destroyed plates for Antlitz der Zeit [Face of Our Time] (1929), his first photobook. These portraits don’t show a homogenous mass, much less an imagined volk, destined to supremacy. Rather, they capture individuals caught up in the maelstrom of history, and yet hanging on to some ineffable sense of dignity.