“TYPOLOGIEN” at Fondazione Prada, Milan

“Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany,” curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt, offers an extensive overview of 20th-century German photography. The exhibition project attempts to apply the concept of ‘typology,’ which was derived from the botanical studies of the 17th and 18th centuries and explored by photography since the beginning of the 20th century. The curatorial strategy applies this principle to the photographic work of German artists of different generations. As Pfeffer notes, “Nowhere else in photography have so many typologies and their playful and political antipodes been created as in Germany in the 20th century. They enable a clarity of their own, which allows similarities and differences to emerge. The systematic approach concentrates our vision and thinking, enabling us to see other details and recognize larger contexts.”

The exhibition presents over 600 photographs taken between 1906 and 2000s by 25 artists whose work is united by the desire to classify reality using a systematic and serial criterion. It features photographic works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans- Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. The project highlights the uniqueness of each artistic practice while establishing unexpected links between different approaches to the language of photography.

As the curator states, “Only through juxtaposition and direct comparison is it possible to find out what is individual and what is universal, what is normative or real. Differences are evidence of the abundance of nature and the imagination of humans: the fern, the cow, the human being, the ear; the bus stop, the water tower, the stereo system, the museum. The typological comparison allows differences and similarities to emerge and the specifics to be grasped. Unknown or previously unperceived things about nature, the animal, or the object, about place and time become visible and recognizable.”

In photography, the typological approach implies the equivalence of images and the elimination of any hierarchy between the subjects represented and the sources from which the images originate. However, typology is a complex concept that operates in a state of duality: on the one hand, it is based on the imposition of extreme objectivity; on the other, it leads to individual and creative choice.

The notion that photography plays a fundamental role in defining specific phenomena, but also in organizing and cataloguing a multitude of visible manifestations, remains a central theme in contemporary artistic practice that explores the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the pervasiveness of digital images and technologies, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and redefined by contemporary photographers and artists. As Pfeffer highlights, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent.
The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. In this very precise moment—it seems even more important to follow the artists’ gaze and look closely.”

at Fondazione Prada, Milan
until July 14, 2025