A Giant German Photography Survey Reinvigorates the Medium

The Milanese Fondazione Prada presents an exhibition entitled "Typologies. German Photography in the 20th Century." Who is, of course, in the middle of it – and what remains to be spared? On a warm summer day in 1728, Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, then still a young medical student, was bitten by a microscopic little animal – only a few "lines long, not thicker than a hair, but even hairy: the so-called Furia infernalis, the Hellfurie. The …

A Giant German Photography Survey Reinvigorates the Medium

Pictures shot dead-on and then arranged in rows or grids comprise almost every contribution to “Typologien,” a survey of 20th-century German photography at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. No horizon line is even mildly crooked, and all fall where they ought to—in the picture’s bottom third—or else are eliminated by way of a backdrop or an aerial view. That’s not surprising; Germans are famous for their love of rules, plenty of which, when it co…