What is Typology?
Typology is typically a body of work that holds consistency throughout the work, usually in the environment, subjects and presentation.
Bernd and Hilla Becher
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.
Black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure. The rigorous frontality of the individual images gives them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness.
research who influenced the Bechers’… from three German photographers in the 1920s, Karl Blosfeldt (plant studies), August Sander (portraits of citizens of Cologne) and Albert Renger-Patz (he photographed industrial landscapes)
The Bechers’ were inspired by Karl Blossfeldts plant studies, they were inspired by the way he presented his work.
Kevin Bauman
100 Abandoned Houses:
The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. He actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of his home town. Bauman had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.
100 Abandoned houses is my favourite project of Kevin Bauman. Each abandoned house contrasts one another yet they fit perfectly when put together next to eachother. Every house is different in its own way, however, as the pictures are taken roughly from the same distance, they belong.
