In 1931 August Sander explained his book Face of our time as “fundamentally a declaration of faith in photography as a universal language”. However, the grammar he invented to connect his images shaped a specifically German photograph for a century. Assembly and brilliantly, portrait by portrait, class by class, profession by profession – Boulanger, beggar, bailiff, banker – Sander classified and categorized his subjects to represent the first democratic society of Germany, the Weimar Republic, to disappear.
Typologian: photography in 20th century GermanyA superb insightful exposure to Milan's Prada Foundation, retraces the complex connections between the camera and the country, the creation of images and history. He explores the typology as a concept of organization in photography from the 1920s to today, and which connects to the German order ideals to upset them: the typology here is the weapon of photography for disturbances and criticism, surrealist associations and neglected beauty, starting with Sander himself.
When the Nazis destroyed the plates of “Face of our time” in 1936, Sander continued to photograph, adding categories: “SS Captain”, “The Persioned”, represented like all the others, a constant and full frontal look. The order of the aggressor and the victim terrifies. In the neutrality of his ordered portrait sequences, Sander recorded the descent of Germany in violent chaos.
Weimar's culture, its great gravity and its bewitching anarchy, is wonderfully mentioned as soon as you enter the high and dark galleries of Prada. Karl Blossfeldt, professor of Berlin design, uses a homemade camera and a magnifying glass to inspire its students with the graphic elegance of vegetable life: its sequence of covered fougère fronds, each decoration, resembles lyrical artistic patterns.
Nearby, the dizzying images of the photojournalist “Mystery of the Street” (1928) hang backwards, so that the great shadows of workers and passers -by to weave on real bodies. Expressionism converge with spatial disorientation inspired by the Bauhaus, this agitated haunting sequence is rare; Umbo would lose an eye as a war photographer, and most of his archives in a bombing raid.
But its influence extends until the 21st century – the show is not strictly chronological – in the brutal and strange “transport sites” of Ursula Schulz -Dornburg (1997-2011). They have bus stops from Armenia from the Soviet era, each a miniature constructivist wonder, now decaying on fallow roads where the bus never arrives. The women of the poor village, “dressed as if they were going to the opera,” were constantly waiting, recalls Schulz Dornburg. As While waiting for GodotThe “transit sites” express stoic grace in an unpredictable world.
We consider that German art is heavy, but Milan gives the stage to many jokes. Sigmar Polke transforms domestic palm plants, the emblem of the German consumer of the 1960s, into threatening or comic shapes – cloud of mushrooms, phallus, whip, a naked self -portrait mocking decorated with palm leaves like angel wings, “Polke as palm” (1968). “All ladies – cows in Europe” by Ursula Bohmer ,, gigantic portraits of single female cattle, proudly with horns, varying in size, color, texture of the skin and, apparently, to a character – distant, grumpy, curious, docile – flies the show. His cows are faced with huge human portraits such as Passport style representations without effect of Thomas Ruff, each wrinkle enlarged, questioning realism.
The extreme cataloging of Hans -Peter Feldmann is a joke in “All the clothes of a woman” (1974) – an inventory of articles by elements, pants, stockings, coat, shoes – but provocative to “The Dead” (1967-1993), 90 found images of those killed or missing in German terrorist incidents. Alongside the industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer, murdered by the faction of the Red Army, is the terrorist Andreas Baader in a swimming pool of his own blood and woman at the home Edith Kletzhändler, accidentally pulled in a raid of the Red Army Faction Bank. All are equal in death, but the levels of guilt are questioned – detailing the SS past SS of Schleyer, his killer Rolf Wagner boasted in 2007: “We did not choose it by chance …. Many of our decisions seem correct.”
Prada's spectacle compares itself in a fascinating way to the vision of another foreigner on the photographic history of a nation, the excellent of the excellent of Rijksmuseum American photography. Who pivots around the American dream; This around the German nightmare of 1933-1945. However, the two celebrate individualism: TypologiesGlory is how the differences in a category shine.
The “people of the 20th century” of Sander declares common humanity in diversity. Showing his subjects as they wanted to be shown, he frees them from sociology to reach our hearts. The “magician” of the circus in a fuel coat presents itself as a bourgeois carriers. “Secretary on the Radio Ouest-German”, short hair, androgynous look, cigarettes, has a Glamor in Cabaret. The old -fashioned woman “victim of persecution” is remarkably worthy.
After 1945, the opportunities of the typology for the nuance and the subtext attracted photographers who find it difficult to portray the inevitable but invisible truth on their country: the German post-war fractures, the unresolved past, the theft of memory.
The “anonymous sculptures” of Bernd and Hilla Becher, repetitive “portraits” of obsolete Ruhr buildings – water desbiens, cooling towers, stove highs, coal silos – resumed to sand as industrial archeology. Really, they evoke a ruined civilization: the columns of the water towers recall the classic temples; Heroic melancholy does not allow any overview of the new factories feeding the economic miracle of Germany.
Those who are influenced by the beating mixture of austere objectivity, minimalism and documentary realism include Thomas Struth, starting his career with the fuzzy distant figures “People in the street, Düsseldorf” (1974-78), Candida Höfer, representative of large, sumptuous libraries of readers – a high culture had not saved Weimar – tire gursky. His epic photographs saturated in color of the daily existence were shaped in geometric formats stalls the show: thousands of rows of chocolate bars in “99 hundred”; Thousands of windows flickering in the “Paris Montparnasse” housing block, living abstract high density in an anonymous grid.
From the banality of global capitalism of Gursky, it is a stage towards the banality of the evil of Gerhard Richter: his anthology “Atlas”, a collection started in 1962 of his own photographs and newspapers, seems random – romantic landscapes, toilet rolls, family snapshots – until it is not, and images of the holocaust suddenly interrupt this innovative creation. “Atlas” horribly predicts the incessant and insane images of today, we undress at the atrocity.
It is a worried but enriching exhibition, with revealing names of the two Germans. From the East, the formal series and Berlin Lichtenberg “of Sibylle Bergemann, of elegant modernist salons, and the images of the monochrome family of Christian Borchourt, take place in the house, the garden or the farm of the subject, like everyone, pay tribute to the survival strategy and are eloquent of fair domestic life under communism and the exile interior.
The Ouest-German discovery is the pharmacist who has become a photographer Heinrich Riebesehl, who introduced the smuggling of his camera in the elevator of the offices of Neue Hannoversche Presse and photographed all those who entered it on November 20, 1969. German modernity and Nostalgia hindered in riebehl “People in the Elevator” Miniskirts and Mascara; The Lady of Restoration with its trays; A crushed cart boy; The intellectual in the Homburg glasses and hat, a Wood of Weimar's wood, stifling in the confined spot-broken cube-surely a metaphor of the camera in a box itself, forging each fleeting individual in the face of an image of an era.
As of July 14, Fondazioneprada.org
