Inside Fondazione Prada’s exploration of 20th century German photography (2025)

On 20 November 1969, German photographer Heinrich Riebesehl spent a total of five hours and 35 minutes discreetly documenting the patrons of a lift in the building that housed Neue Hannoversche Presse, a daily newspaper published in Hanover between 1946-71. The series, which he titled Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 (People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969), can be read as a kind of survey of all the individuals it takes to make a paper come together: one image features a man in a smart suit and overcoat, a reporter potentially, looking up as the light dances across his glasses; in another is a woman, presumably from the canteen, facing away from the camera with a trolley of dirty serving dishes in front of her.

A further standout, which also features in a new exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Typologien: Photography in 20th Century Germany, is a double portrait of two young women, a blonde and a brunette, dressed in a similar fashion (think collared tops and buttoned skirts; hair tied back with off-centre partings). Their youth, mirrored styles, and body language suggest they could be secretaries sharing secrets on their way out to lunch, however it’s impossible to know for sure. Riebesehl was uninterested in the circumstances of his subjects, focused instead on the situation of being in the lift and the behaviours that then occur while we wait (in contrast, Thomas Struth’s People on the Street, Düsseldorf 1974-78, which sits opposite at Fondazione Prada, explores the movements of people rushing about, resulting in several blurred profiles).

“It’s not an exhibition focusing on German photography in general,” the show’s curator, art historian and director of Museum Mmk Für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Susanne Pfeffer clarifies, “but really focusing on artists who did typologies in a lot of different ways and approaches – peculiar and funny, but also in quite rigid ways too.” These typologies vary largely throughout the space and in the accompanying catalogue – from photographs of cabbages, highland cows and bus shelters to more traditional family portraits – united in the fact that they bring together a common principle or intention of classification.

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 Düsseldorf School of Photography, a movement spearheaded by Bernd and Hilla Becher at Kunstakademie Düsseldorffrom 1976, where students included Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer (all of whom appear in Milan). Their ideas, focused on a particular brand of uniform objectivity, in turn echoed that of Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity), which emerged from an exhibition of the same name staged in 1923, characterised at the time by organiser G.F. Hartlaub as “new realism bearing a socialist flavour”.

In Pfeffer’s Typologien there are over 600 works by 25 artists, all made between 1906 and 2000 (Gursky’s bold depiction of an industrial tulip field is a rare anomaly, made in 2015). Though not designed chronologically, Karl Blossfeldt’s 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 – while Wolfgang Tillmans’ bleached Concorde series from 1997 is blown up to a mammoth scale. Upstairs, Ruff’s 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. “I had never thought about her as a photographer,” the curator tells Dazed, “but I love to do research, and I love when the outcome is different from the way you started.”

“The whole exhibition is thinking about how you can represent a society,” she continues, reflecting in particular on the work of August Sander and the period in Germany surrounding the Second World War. The Cologne-born photographer’s renowned survey, People of the 20th Century (an early iteration of which was first published in 1929) is an extensive project which began as a study of different social classes and includes a ‘Portfolio of Archetypes’. Today, it’s recognised as a landmark work, but it also highlights the problematic potential of typologies and how they can serve nationalism and fascism.

While Pfeffer acknowledges these issues, her focus is otherwise drawn to how newer technologies have since refigured how typologies can be considered. As she writes, “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.” Where she lands is recognising how juxtaposition and direct comparison can reveal what is universal and what is individual. Ultimately, she concludes, “[the exhibition] shows how rich the world is, and how beautiful the differences and the similarities are, and also to focus on what we all have in common.”

Typologien: Photography in 20th Century Germany is on show at Fondazione Prada, Milan, until 14 July, 2025.