Try a typology

Michael Freeman explains that combining collections of subjects can be both a pleasing and rewarding creative path to go down

Even though I’ve never been completely convinced by this one, I’m duty bound to offer it up because… simply, it works in my section of the market. My doubts are about just how actually creative it is, but the word ‘creative’ does have different interpretations, and in the contemporary art world it’s often more about concept than individual skill.

So yes, this is directed toward the art world. Typology means a study of types and of classifying things, and it really belongs to science, but art always co-opts ideas from other areas in order to stay fresh and relevant.

The typology idea in photography is to bring together a lot of images of the same type of thing, shot in the same kind of way. A type of example (sorry, couldn’t resist) is the industrial architecture lovingly photographed by the Düsseldorf duo Bernd and Hilla Becher from around 1959 onwards, starting in the Ruhr Valley. They included water towers, barns, blast furnaces, coal bunkers, gas tanks and so on. They were all shot head-on on cloudy days, and were then presented in groups. They also actually called them ‘typologies’, thereby kicking off the whole craze.

Photographing sets of things is nothing new, of course, but there’s a creative line that needs to be drawn somewhere between catalogue photography and assembling a record

of something significant. The German photographer August Sander did this, starting in the 1920s with his portraits of types of German society, from farmers to factory workers to actors. American portrait and still-life photographer Irving Penn did something similar with his Worlds in a Small Room, published in 1974 after 25 years of carrying around the world a portable studio lit with natural light.

Everything in its right place

Back in 1963, American artist Ed Ruscha made his first book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which delivered no surprises other than the idea of bothering to catalogue these at all — and it was a success. Ruscha said, “I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a ‘Huh?’ That‘s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message.”

This in turn helped the Bechers set the ball rolling, and by teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf they influenced at least a generation of photographers (one of their alumni, Andreas Gursky, currently holds the world record for price paid for a photograph, with his Rhein II).

It’s becoming a slightly crowded market for subject matter, so check out what’s been done already so that you don’t waste your time doing seconds. If it’s something you already have a special interest in, all the better. Here are a few predictable or overdone ones to avoid: old cinema façades, house number plates, postboxes, unusual street signage, eyes. And here are some recently seen typologies that seem fresher: old nuclear test sites, Japanese imitations of the Eiffel Tower, plastic bags caught on trees and bushes, old books from public libraries.

The slightly strange thing to me is just how popular typology collections are. Hardly anyone has a bad word to say against them. They appeal to a love of order, uniformity and collecting, and it seems most people respond to those. What few people, and none at all in the art business, mention is that typologies are very do-able, meaning therefore predictable and can be planned.

Curators and museum directors absolutely love that, and it also relieves the photographer from having to exercise any on-the-spot skill, like in street photography. It might be unkind to say safety in numbers, but one of the great advantages of a typology is that, provided you’ve got the idea and the style right, the more photographs you add, the stronger it becomes. Good typologies are different in either concept or execution from what most people expect, and the fuller they become, the more they establish just what a good idea you had in the first place.

When the audience reaction becomes something along the lines of, ‘I never realized there was so much of that around and I never even noticed’, you’re in business. The other thing a few people seem to say is that sets of pictures all shot the same way are, just quite possibly, a bit boring.

It’s becoming a slightly crowded market for subject matter, so check out what’s been done already so that you don’t waste your time