The exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, curated by Susanne Pfeffer in the spaces of the Prada Foundation in Milan, presents an articulated journey through over 600 photographs created from 1906 to the 2000s by 25 German authors. The exhibition, conceived according to a classificatory and serial principle borrowed from botanical studies, reveals an evident methodological analogy with Aby Warburg’s (Hamburg, 1866 – 1929) speculative approach to art history, no longer based on stylistic periods, but on the detection of the migration of symbols and motifs through time, cultures and expressive media.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Bernd & Hilla Becher “Hochöfen”, 1970-89 [Blast furnaces], 12 gelatin silver prints © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, courtesy of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne, 2025; Candida Höfer, “BNF Paris XXIII”, 1998, inkjet print, exhibition print © Candida Höfer, Cologne, by SIAE 2025/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2025

The installation transforms the spaces of the Podium and Podium +1 into a path that only initially appears labyrinthine. Once the initial vertigo has passed, given at the entrance by the immediate revelation of dense grids of images indistinguishable from afar, the suspended panels of neutral tones that collect them reveal a “Greek key” path that, in its angular folding, creates continuous visual and conceptual references between the different sections while not loosening their concatenation. This spatial conformation can also be read as a persistence of Warburgian methodology, based on the juxtaposition and displacement of forms in different times and contexts. In the Atlas, whose name derives from the Greek goddess of memory Mnemosyne, left incomplete at his death, the German art historian had arranged on a series of 63 tables about 1,000 photographic images of artworks, archaeological finds, advertising images, newspaper clippings and other visual materials, organized according to thematic and not chronological relationships. Instead of entrusting his thought to written text alone, the scholar, considered among the founders of modern iconology, had created a visual device that allowed the viewer to grasp intuitive connections between images. Similarly, the exhibition path, organized according to a typological and not chronological order, traces a century of a specific line of research in German photography in a panorama that takes the form of a synchronic constellation of images classified with botanical methodology.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Thomas Struth, “Louvre 4”, Paris, 1989, color photograph on C-print, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe; Thomas Struth, “Art Institute of Chicago 2”, Chicago, 1990, C-print, courtesy of the artist

A central concept in Warburg’s work is that of Nachleben, or the survival and transformation of classical symbols, and that of Pathosformel (pathos formulas), with which he identified gestures and expressions that transmit intense emotions, also recurring in Western art from antiquity to the modern age. If the Warburgian Atlas aimed to trace persistences in a dialectic between synchrony and diachrony, some German photographers from the twentieth century, around the same years, began to pursue an analogous objective of ordering and classifying reality, seeking to identify constants and variables in objects, places and bodies. The concept of “typology” that serves as the cornerstone of the exhibition, borrowed from the scientific classification of plant species, grafts onto this common philosophical matrix as a method to try to catalog reality not so much through the identification of generalized types as in phytology, but as a systematic application to given series of images of conceptual and visual parameters of comparison designed to bring out through subtraction the specificities of each object of investigation through the emphasis on similarities.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Andreas Gursky, “Paris, Montparnasse”, 1993, inkjet print, Atelier Andreas Gursky, by SIAE 2025

The methodical approach of Karl Blossfeldt (Schielo, 1865 – Berlin, 1932) to plant forms, placed at the beginning of the exhibition path, seems a perfect photographic incarnation of the Warburgian method. The enlarged black and white images, taken from his first photographic volume entitled Urformen der Kunst (Primordial Forms of Art, 1928) and depicting details of plant specimens that the author used to collect in Berlin and surroundings, manifest an analogous interest in the archetype and the original form, persistent through its innumerable variations. The curled frond of the fern or the grooved stem of a sprout become, through the lens of his objective, a botanical “formula” capable of revealing the deep structure of the natural world while conferring an unprecedented sculptural quality to these particulars divorced from any context by the uniform gray background.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Andreas Gursky, “99 Cent”, 1999, remastered 2009, inkjet print, Atelier Andreas Gursky, by SIAE 2025

The archival and classificatory method finds its maximum expression in the work of Bernd (Siegen, 1931 – Rostock, 2007) and Hilla Becher (Potsdam, 1934 – Düsseldorf, 2015), whose “types” of industrial buildings (blast furnaces, water towers) are objectified and photographed according to rigorously identical parameters, thus allowing to highlight both structural constants and individual variations. As in the Warburgian project, here too the serial juxtaposition of apparently similar images allows to “discover, in direct comparison, what is individual and what is universal”, as curator Pfeffer effectively states. In the exhibition, in addition to two iconic series of architectural subjects by the couple, who had among their students at the Düsseldorf Academy fundamental exponents of German photography, such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Simone Nieweg, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, we find Hilla’s 1965 photographic studies of an oak leaf, a cypress branch and a ginkgo leaf. These shots, while fitting into the serial line of industrial architectural typologies, through a capillary orchestration of light and shadow privilege the surface qualities of the portrayed elements rather than emphasizing their sculptural and monumental value.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, “Transit Sites-Armenia-Erevan-Goris”, 2000, “Transit Sites-Armenia-Erevan-Gymri”, 2000, “Transit Sites-Armenia-Erevan-Ararat”, 2001, gelatin silver prints on Forte paper, © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

The black and white photographs on display by Lotte Jacobi (Thorn, 1896 – Concord, 1990) belong to the botanical field, which, unlike those of Blossfeldt, present themselves as true plant portraits, in which flowers no longer appear as enigmatic theoretical objects, but as tenderly sentient individualities. The same type of framing returns in the floral subjects of Thomas Struth (1954, Geldern), animated by a search for formal and chromatic exactness that creates an alienating tension in imposing a normative intention on subjects that are inherently so ethereal like flowers in their natural environment. Halfway between the botanical subject and the broader classification of places where plant species useful to man are cultivated, are the shots of Simone Nieweg (1962, Bielefeld): through precise management of chromatic quality and composition, common elements like cabbages, pumpkins and tool sheds in gardens (the latter reminiscent of the Bechers’ lesson) become protagonists of a visual narrative that transcends their ordinariness. Such photography thus fits into the German typological tradition with an anthropological perspective, noting how even nature domesticated for productive purposes contains an aesthetic potential that deserves to be documented with the same methodical precision reserved for other more frequented subjects.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Marianne Wex, “Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures”, “Historical Example: Seated Men and Women, 1977/2019”, “Arm and Leg Positions, Lying on the Ground”, 1977/2018 archival inkjet prints, edition of 5 + 2 AP (#2/5), courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

The section dedicated to human typology ideally begins with the work of August Sander (1876, Herdorf – 1964, Cologne), whose monumental project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century), a monumental atlas of trades, professions and social conditions in Germany during the Weimar Republic, seems to decline in equal and opposite direction Warburg’s encyclopedic vocation. Sander’s attempt to create a visual archive of the German”social types” through posed portraiture that exalts the descriptive and documentary qualities of the photographic medium recalls the classificatory and comparative method of the Mnemosyne Atlas. With a fundamental difference: if Warburg worked on already existing images, Sander creates them specifically, giving life to an archive that is at the same time documentation and creation. Incidentally, it is interesting to note how the fascinating photoportrait of the secretary of West German Radio in Cologne, dated between the 1930s and 1950s, is almost an exact reflection, devoid of expressionist deformation, of the famous portrait (almost a monochrome in red scale) that Otto Dix made in 1926 of journalist Sylvia von Harden.

_ Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. August Sander, “Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts”, 3 Gelatin silver prints, © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne; SIAE, Roma, 2025

Even if placed on different (architectural) levels of the exhibition, it is interesting to juxtapose with Sander’s shots the series Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 (People in Elevator, 20.11.1969) by Heinrich Riebesehl (1938, Lathen an der Ems – 2010, Hannover), created with a small format camera operated remotely inside the elevator of the Hannoversche Presse headquarters. The portraits of elevator users, all employees of the German daily newspaper, are simply dated and numbered in progressive order: here the common thread is not, as in Sander, an investigation into gender or profession in different social classes, but a study of body behaviors and gaze of people in that specific space, which turns out to be the classification index. Beyond the conceptual intent, these images betray a broader interest in photographic portraiture for the sensitive capacity of emotional penetration that in the rendering of each subject goes beyond the neutrality of the “type” to suggest a more complex character in an almost cinematographic sense, not devoid of character irony. An analogous attitude, without this latter psychological connotation, is found in the series People on the Street, Düsseldorf 1974–78 by Thomas Struth, a study that investigates the movements and postures of individuals walking in profile on a sidewalk in front of the camera lens placed in a fixed position. If the visual constant is precisely the portion of window and wall that serves as background to the passage of people, as well as the framing of their shots, what diversifies are the human configurations and their distinctive attributes.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Thomas Ruff, “Porträt (Pia Stadtbäumer)”, 1988, “Porträt (Claus Föttinger)”, 1987, “Porträt (Petra Lappert), 1987, “Porträt (Simone Buch)”, 1988, C-print laminated on acrylic glass, MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt am Main © Thomas Ruff, by SIAE 2025

Expression of a diametrically opposite aesthetic are instead the giant photographs by Thomas Ruff (1958, Zell am Harmersbach) from the Porträt series (Pia Stadtbäumer, Claus Föttinger, Petra Lappert, Simone Buch, 1987-88), in which the faces of a perfect youth uniformed by a clear mental light fix the lens with neutral expressions like passport photos, which the unusual enlargement renders mysterious and intriguingly repelling. A completely conceptual typology belongs to the portraits from the cycle entitled Die Toten 1967-1993 (The Dead 1967-1993), created in the 1990s by Hans Peter Feldmann (1941 – 2023) and focused on the victims of dissident political movements of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1967 and 1993. It is a collection, standardized by format, of 90 grainy enlargements of photographs published in newspapers and magazines, an encyclopedic collection of deaths that, without making any distinction between executors, victims and bystanders, between bloodied corpse and tombstone portrait, catalogs the methods of media treatment of those violent facts.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Rosemarie Trockel, “Elena I & II”, 1993/2025, “Maculata I & II”, 1993/2025, “Mela I & II”, 1993/2025, 2 color photographs, AP, private collection, courtesy of Sprüth Magers and the artist, by SIAE 2025

The ‘methodological or aesthetic Warburgian root, as we have suggested winding through many of the authors in the exhibition, in some appears more exposed. As, for example, in the work of Jochen Lempert (1958, Moers) on the profiles of the Great Auk, a bird extinct in 1852: the series of 54 profiles of stuffed specimens in museums around the world (shot in the years 1992-2022) reveals, in the obsessive repetition of the same subject in black and white, the always imperfect coincidence between ideal type and individual variation, between scientific classification and biological reality. But the most direct reference to the Warburgian method is perhaps represented by the Atlas of Gerhard Richter (1932, Dresden), a work in continuous evolution that, like the Mnemosyne Atlas, collects and organizes heterogeneous materials (photographs, newspaper clippings, sketches) in an open system of visual relationships. The choice to include in this personal atlas the images of the Holocaust reveals, moreover, how attention to repetition and variation can be a path of investigation open to both ethical and aesthetic domains.

Exhibition view of “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”, photo: Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada. Thomas Struth, “The Richter Family 1”, Cologne 2002, C-print, courtesy of the artist

The strength of the exhibition, in conclusion, lies in its ability to show, through the evolution of German photography from the twentieth century, the persistence of a method of thinking through images that finds in Warburg its most lucid theorist. From Blossfeldt’s botany to Sander’s visual sociology, from the Bechers’ industrial archaeology to Richter’s exasperated objectivity, the Warburgian “atlas principle” reveals its imperishable fecundity as an instrument of knowledge and interpretation of reality. Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany therefore invites us to rethink an important and varied corpus of German photography as a great collective atlas, an attempt to map reality by systematically confronting the tension between order and chaos, between typology and individuality, between the classificatory impulse and the resistance of reality to any form of schematic reduction. The exhibition path, moreover, impeccable in its coldly engaging atmosphere, becomes an effective visual expression of a cognitive method, deeply rooted in national philosophical culture, based on the continuous movement of the gaze between similarities and differences, between the particular and the universal.

Info:

Typologien: Photography in 20 th-century Germany
Artists: Bernd e 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) e Marianne Wex.
3/05/2025 – 14/07/2025
Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco, 2 – Milano
www.fondazioneprada.org

Emanuela Zanon

Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.

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