\u201cIt\u2019s not an exhibition focusing on German photography in general,\u201d the show\u2019s curator, art historian and director of Museum Mmk F\u00fcr Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Susanne Pfeffer clarifies, \u201cbut really focusing on artists who did typologies in a lot of different ways and approaches \u2013 peculiar and funny, but also in quite rigid ways too.\u201d These typologies vary largely throughout the space and in the accompanying catalogue \u2013 from photographs of cabbages, highland cows and bus shelters to more traditional family portraits \u2013 united in the fact that they bring together a common principle or intention of classification.<\/p>\n Originally employed in botanical studies in the 17th and 18th century, the concept of typologies was a core thread in the work that arrived from the D\u00fcsseldorf School of Photography, a movement spearheaded by Bernd and Hilla Becher at Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf\u00a0from 1976, where students included Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida H\u00f6fer (all of whom appear in Milan). Their ideas, focused on a particular brand of uniform objectivity, in turn echoed that of Neue Sachlichkeit\u00a0(New Objectivity), which emerged from an exhibition of the same name staged in 1923, characterised at the time by organiser G.F. Hartlaub as \u201cnew realism bearing a socialist flavour\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Pfeffer\u2019s Typologien there are over 600 works by 25 artists, all made between 1906 and 2000 (Gursky\u2019s bold depiction of an industrial tulip field is a rare anomaly, made in 2015). Though not designed chronologically, Karl Blossfeldt\u2019s elegant plant studies from the 1920s open the show. Shot in black and white, from a distance they could almost be skyscrapers or elaborate wedding cakes \u2013 while Wolfgang<\/a> Tillmans<\/a>\u2019 bleached Concorde series from 1997 is blown up to a mammoth scale. Upstairs, Ruff\u2019s passport pictures, shot in the 1980s, mirror these proportions, while nearby is a wall of ears, photographed in close up by Isa Genzken in New York that same decade. \u201cI had never thought about her as a photographer,\u201d the curator tells Dazed, \u201cbut I love to do research, and I love when the outcome is different from the way you started.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Thomas Struth, \u201cStudies of people on the street, D\u00fcsseldorf 1974\u20131978\u201dAtelier Thomas Struth, Berlin \u00a9 Thomas Struth<\/p>\n
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Isa Genzken, \u201cOhr\u201d (1980)Galerie Buchholz Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz \u00a9 Isa Genzken, by SIAE 2025<\/p>\n