Typologies and Archetypes

 “A typology is assembled by observation, collection, naming and grouping. These actions allow the members of the class to be compared, usually in search of broader patterns.” 

- Marc Freidus

Typology is the study of "types", and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner. The art of Photographic Typologies has its roots in August Sander’s 1929 series of portraits entitled "Face of Our Time", a collection of works documenting German society between the two World Wars. Sander sought to create a record of social types, classes and the relationships between them, and recognised that the display of his portraits as a collection revealed so much more than the individual images would alone. So powerful was this record, the photographic plates were destroyed and the book was banned soon after the Nazis came into power four years later.

The term ‘Typology’ was first used to describe a style of photography when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. The couple described their subjects as "buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style". Stoic and detached, each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings. Their aim was to capture a record of a landscape they saw changing and disappearing before their eyes so once again, Typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.

Typologies appear to be objective, finding specific items that fit a clearly defined category but because someone has to create that category in the first place it can be seen as an act of invention. It is here that the artistic mind is located. Stylistically, these typologies try to remove the unique “artist’s hand,” and this may be the reason they are found more in photographic work than in painting or sculpture. The ability to compare the similarities and differences between the components of a typology is important and for this reason artists often use a grid, book format or a linear layout in a contained space to aid in this analysis across subjects.