CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Typologies
Series that collect and compare many examples of one kind of thing, presented so that likeness and difference can be read side by side.
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About
A typology gathers examples of a single type and shows them in a consistent way, inviting comparison. The method comes from natural history and science: botanical plates, fossil charts and Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomic studies of faces in the 1770s. Karl Blossfeldt's close-up photographs of stems, buds and seed heads, published in 1928, made plants look like cast-iron ornament.
Photography suits the approach because it can standardise viewpoint and light. In Germany August Sander spent decades on a portrait atlas of society ordered by occupation and class. From 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed water towers, winding towers and blast furnaces head-on under overcast skies and showed them in grids. Others added irony or critique, as in Ed Ruscha's photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) or Taryn Simon's catalogues of hidden systems. Look for strict consistency of framing, which turns small variations into the real subject.
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