The series provides a consistent visual theme for a photographer‘s body of work and it has the advantages of delving into a subject more deeply than a single image can possibly achieve thereby increasing understanding and at the same time making it easier for galleries to market and for curators to accept. Whilst series are successful for marketing this approach has the disadvantage that many photographers create sequences purely for the market which can lead to cynical and crass projects. To criticize photographers for making a living and galleries for understanding their customers can appear unfair but I feel the process can limit rather than enhance artistic development.
 
If we step back from the photographic series of distinct images, which is a form of typology, to its purest form in photography the representation of multiple types on a single image we can, for this discussion, largely ignore the motivations of the photographer. Certainly some of these images were created to show the possibilities of photography for example Articles of China [The Pencil of Nature, Part 1, pl. 3] by Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) whilst others were record shots or advertising, for example the silver print of the Babies Lawn Caps by the Stadler Photographing Company (ca. 1900) or the Cooking pots Palalum (Palestine Aluminium Company) taken by Alfons Himmelreich (1944) which is stylistically so similar to the display of artillery shells in Établissements Schneider. Usine du Creusot. Projectiles divers fabriqués au Creusot. Juillet 1916 taken by Photographie Schneid Cie.
 
If we start by looking at some miltary photographs the creation of the vast displays of weapons in stately homes, palaces and castles took the weapons of war from the magazines and storerooms and converted them into ornaments and we see this in the photographs of the Spanish collections by Juan Laurent (1816-1886) and in a wonderful series of plates by Alfred Saint-Ange Briquet of the French military equipment from 1862 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et Photographie. Eo 121 folio tome 3. Ancienne collection Georges Sirot). The decorative display of weapons alters their purpose into one of harmonious ornamental types.
 
Within the natural world Anna Atkins in her volumes of cyanotypes used photographs as a direct study aid - photography was a tool that had immediate utility to understand the complexities of Linnaean classification and to place plants and animals in their proper place and that was first done through the visual analysis of characteristics. Later the shapes of the plants themselves were seen to have merit as an aid to design and the books by Karl Blossfeldt, including Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature] in the 1920s, are a well known example of the use of plants as a stimulus to the creative arts. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the pleasures of hunting, collecting and study were intertwined and so the displays of dead game birds and taxidermy were not a distinct part of an uncaring culture but a reflection of a different time with different values. As L.P. Hartley wrote in his novel "The Go-Between" "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". We need to bare in mind that environmental awareness and the ecological damage of human activity in the public mind only came about with books like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 and so the nineteenth century use of butterfly wings for tray tops and wall decorations was not viewed as destructive but rather as the beauty of nature as a manifestation of Divine Creation. When contemporary artist Damien Hirst uses live and dead butterflies in his installations and "Butterfly Paintings" it is to provoke controversy about how we see the natural world.
 
The typology of the human form has been a scientific study for many years with physical anthropologists, ethnographers, anatomists, criminologists and many others taking their own perspectives. The multiple lenses of the carte de visite (CDV) camera created a portrait typology and there are many surviving examples of the uncut sheets of André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (1819-1889) showing these. Within this exhibition there is a CDV collage card showing Booth and his associates with seven portraits of the assassins involved in the plot to murder Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 - a typology of criminals. The drawing up of typologies of criminals and those disposed towards crime was common in the nineteenth century and the recording of offenders using cards with their photographs was introduced by a Parisian police official, Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), and still continues today. The mug shot and the identity card are attempts to create order through recognisable types out of complexity. There are many trends within contemporary photography that explore types - Annu Palakunnathu Matthew uses portrait comparisons between the photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis and herself to examine ethnicity, Karl Baden has photographed himself over many years to examine change and Frank Rodick examines the raw energy of emotions.
 
Advertising is a highly structured form of typology as it highlights the products and services of an organization for comparative purposes and at the same time distinguishes them visually from similar products by competitors. The photograph by Oliviero Toscani for the highly effective 1996 Benetton clothing campaign shows three human hearts and is a typology of meat but at the same time the obvious similarities attack our racial attitudes and actions according to our preconceptions about skin color.
 
Single images that contain multiple elements can contain complex messages within them.
 
Alan Griffiths
[March 8th, 2009]