Issue 103 | February 11 - 18, 2022
This week’s featured photographer, Rafael Herrin-Ferri, and his project, All The Queens Houses, have me reflecting on photographic typologies and their history and role in the medium.
One of the earliest commercially printed photobooks, The Book of Bread published in 1903, was a cookbook, a photobook, and, in the way it set of examples of bread against simple backgrounds, a photographic typology describing different kinds of bread.
Karl Blossfeldt’s book Art Forms In Nature, published in 1928, isolated details of plant forms against plain cardboard backgrounds in a typology of the kaleidoscopic forms of nature. Blossfeldt saw his typology as an instructional reference for artists and sculptors, and a manifestation of the New Objectivity movement which was a reaction to the abstractions, and gauzy romanticism of Expressionism.
August Sander’s epic project People of the 20th Century, best known from a photo book made from a small selection of the work, Face of Our Time published in 1929, was a photo typology of people and extended the principles of New Objectivity into portraiture. While the idea of categorizing people into different types is now often seen as a suspect and even a potentially dangerous reductionist view of humanity, Sanders’ images of people, viewed just as photographs, apart from the philosophical/ ideological approach that helped conceive the project, are beautiful, absolutely humanistic on their own, and considered some of the finest portraiture works in photo history.
The concept of photo typologies as an artistic approach was really pioneered by German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher starting in 1959. Their systematic and formal photographs of German industrial architecture, displayed in equally formal grids created an austere, but information-rich presentation of some of the industrial engines of the German economy, and they continued with this work into the 1990s.
These days photo typologies are an established genre of photography used for everything from depicting the plastic waste taking over our planet, as Elizabeth Weber does in her Marine Plastic Typology to Elizabeth Bick’s Movement studies which turn the action and energy of Manhattan streets into choreographed ‘Street Ballets’. You don’t really even need to be a photographer anymore to make a photo typology - just searching a tag on Instagram will automatically generate a typology of images (or at least the start of one).
I think the trait that ties together all the most iconic examples of typologies is that they provide a visual perspective that expands our understanding and appreciation of the world. In the case of Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s Queens houses, we are presented with a new portrait of the city, one that makes tangible the idea and ideal of our city as a place of maximal diversity where people of all backgrounds can live together. In the Becher’s typologies, we realize that there can be a genuine formal beauty to the industrial forms we may have just taken for granted, or dismissed as ugly. Weber’s plastic waste typologies give us a new way to conceive of the damage we are inflicting on our oceans - a portrayal that may motivate some to help prevent these harms.
I think the idea of photo typologies is still a rich framework for photographers to explore and investigate the world, and an especially valuable tool in a city like ours which has such an abundance of material to work with. I know some of you all have made some interesting typologies of the city - send them my way, and let’s make a typology of typologies!
I’ll see you next week.
❤️
James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 103 | February 11 - February 18