Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In 1931, August Sander explained his book Face of Our Time as “basically a declaration of faith in photography as a universal language”. Yet the grammar he invented to connect his images shaped a specifically German photography for a century. Acutely and brilliantly, portrait by portrait, class by class, profession by profession — baker, beggar, bailiff, banker — Sander classified and categorised his subjects to portray Germany’s first democratic society, the Weimar Republic, as it was about to disappear.Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, a stunning, insightful exhibition at Milan’s Prada Foundation, traces the complex connections between camera and country, image-making and history. It explores typology as an organising concept in photography from the 1920s to today, and one that connects to German ideals of order only to upend them: typology here is photography’s weapon for disruption and critique, surreal associations and overlooked beauty, starting with Sander himself.When the Nazis destroyed the plates of “Face of Our Time” in 1936, Sander continued photographing, adding categories: “SS captain”, “the persecuted”, depicted like all the others straightforwardly, full-frontal, steady gaze. The ordinariness of aggressor and victim alike terrifies. Within the neutrality of his ordered portrait sequences, Sander recorded Germany’s descent into violent chaos. Weimar culture, its high seriousness and bewitching anarchy, is wonderfully conjured as soon as you enter the Prada’s lofty, darkened galleries. Karl Blossfeldt, a Berlin professor of design, is using a homemade camera and magnifying glass to inspire his students with the graphic elegance of plant life: his sequence of curled-up fern fronds, each decoratively different, resemble lyrical art nouveau patterns. Nearby, photojournalist Umbo’s vertiginous “Mystery of the Street” (1928) images hang upside down, so the tall shadows of labourers and passers-by loom upright over actual bodies. Converging expressionism with Bauhaus-inspired spatial disorientation, this restless, haunting sequence is rare; Umbo would lose an eye as a war photographer, and most of his archive in a bombing raid. But his influence extends to the 21st century — the show is not strictly chronological — in Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s stark, uncanny “Transit Sites” (1997-2011). They feature Armenia’s Soviet-era bus stops, each a miniature constructivist marvel, now decaying on wasteland roads where the bus never arrives. Impoverished village women, “dressed as if they were going to the opera”, waited endlessly, Schulz-Dornburg remembers. Like Waiting for Godot, “Transit Sites” expresses stoical grace in an unpredictable world.We think of German art as heavy, but Milan hands the stage to many jesters. Sigmar Polke transforms domestic palm plants, 1960s German consumer emblem, into threatening or comic forms — mushroom cloud, phallus, whip, a mocking nude self-portrait adorned with palm leaves as angel wings, “Polke as Palm Tree” (1968). Ursula Bohmer’s “All Ladies — Cows in Europe” (1998-2011), gigantic portraits of single, proudly horned female cattle, varying in size, colour, skin texture and, apparently, character — aloof, grumpy, inquisitive, docile — almost steals the show. Her cows confront similarly huge human portraits such as Thomas Ruff’s affectless passport-style depictions, every wrinkle grotesquely enlarged, questioning realism.Hans-Peter Feldmann’s extreme cataloguing is a joke in “All the Clothes of a Woman” (1974) — an item-by-item inventory, knickers, stockings, coat, shoes — but provocatively grave in “The Dead” (1967-1993), 90 found images of those killed or missing in German terrorist incidents. Alongside industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer, murdered by the Red Army Faction, is terrorist Andreas Baader in a pool of his own blood and housewife Edith Kletzhändler, accidentally shot in an Red Army Faction bank raid. All are equal in death, but levels of guilt are questioned — detailing Schleyer’s SS past, his killer Rolf Wagner boasted in 2007, “we didn’t choose him by chance . . . many of our decisions seem correct.”The Prada’s show compares fascinatingly with another outsider’s view of a nation’s photographic history, the Rijksmuseum’s excellent American Photography. That pivots around the American dream; this around the German nightmare of 1933-45. Yet both celebrate individualism: Typologien’s glory is how differences within a category shine bright. Sander’s “People of the 20th Century” declares common humanity in diversity. Showing his subjects as they wished to be shown, he frees them from sociology to touch our hearts. The circus “Magician” in threadbare coat presents himself as a briefcase-carrying bourgeois. “Secretary at West German Radio”, cropped hair, androgynous look, cigarette, has cabaret glamour. The elderly furrowed Jew “Victim of Persecution” is remarkably dignified. After 1945, typology’s opportunities for nuance and subtext attracted photographers struggling to portray the inescapable though invisible truth about their country: Germany’s postwar fractures, unresolved past, flight from remembrance.Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Anonymous Sculptures”, repetitive “portraits” of obsolescent Ruhr buildings — water towers, cooling towers, blast furnaces, coal silos — reprise Sander as industrial archaeology. Really, they evoke a ruined civilisation: the water towers’ columns recall classical temples; the heroic melancholy allows no glimpse of the new factories powering Germany’s economic miracle.Those influenced by the Becher mix of austere objectivity, minimalism and documentary realism include Thomas Struth, beginning his career with the blurry alienated figures “People on the Street, Düsseldorf” (1974-78), Candida Höfer, depicting sumptuous grand libraries emptied of readers — high culture had not saved Weimar — and Andreas Gursky. His epic colour-saturated photographs of quotidian existence shaped into geometric formats stud the show: thousands of rows of chocolate bars in “99 Cent”; thousands of windows flickering in the housing block “Paris Montparnasse”, high-density living abstracted into an anonymous grid. From Gursky’s banality of global capitalism it is a step to Gerhard Richter’s banality of evil: his anthology “Atlas”, a collection begun in 1962 of his own and newspaper photographs, seems random — romantic landscapes, toilet rolls, family snapshots — until it isn’t, and Holocaust footage suddenly interrupts this innocuous everyday parade. “Atlas” horribly predicts today’s ceaseless, mindless image flow, inuring us to atrocity.This is an uneasy but rewarding exhibition, with revelatory names from both Germanies. From the east, Sibylle Bergemann’s formal, poignant “Berlin Lichtenberg” series of stylish modernist living rooms, and Christian Borchert’s monochrome “Family” pictures, set in the subject’s home, garden or farm as each chose, pay homage to Sander and are eloquent of equable domestic life under communism, and of inner exile as survival strategy.West German discovery is pharmacist-turned-photographer Heinrich Riebesehl, who smuggled his camera into the lift of Neue Hannoversche Presse’s offices and photographed all those entering it on November 20 1969. German modernity and nostalgia cram into Riebesehl’s “People in the Elevator”: wide-eyed secretaries in miniskirts and mascara; the catering lady with her trays; a squashed trolley boy; the intellectual in glasses and Homburg hat, a Weimar hangover, stargazing into the confined spotlit cube — surely a metaphor for the boxlike camera itself, forging from each fleeting individual face a picture of an epoch.To July 14, fondazioneprada.org
