I used to think photography was about capturing single, perfect moments—until I stumbled across Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water towers.
The Bechers, a German couple working from the 1950s through the early 2000s, photographed industrial structures with an almost obsessive consistency. Same lighting. Same angle. Same neutral sky. They’d shoot cooling towers, grain elevators, gas tanks—subjects most people wouldn’t glance at twice—and arrange them in grids. Dozens of nearly identical images, side by side. At first, I thought it was, honestly, kind of boring. But here’s the thing: the repetition wasn’t the point. The subtle differences were. One tower might have a cylindrical base, another conical. One might show rust patterns, another fresh paint. By stripping away variables—composition, lighting, context—they made the variations impossible to ignore. It was systematic visual documentation elevated to art, and it fundamentally changed how we think about photographing the world around us.
How Typology Photography Rewired Scientific and Archival Documentation
Typology photography didn’t start with the Bechers, but they definately perfected it. The approach has roots in 19th-century botanical illustration and early anthropological surveys—scientists have always known that comparing similar subjects reveals patterns invisible in isolation. What the Bechers did was apply artistic rigor to documentary method. Their influence rippled outward fast. By the 1970s and 80s, their students—Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth—were applying typological thinking to everything from stock exchanges to library interiors.
Wait—maybe the real revolution wasn’t aesthetic at all. Medical imaging adopted similar principles: think of dermatology atlases showing hundreds of moles arranged by type, or radiological databases organizing fractures by pattern. Forensic photography uses typological frameworks to catalog evidence. Even citizen science projects like iNaturalist rely on users submitting standardized photos of species, creating massive typological archives that train machine learning models. The Bechers’ water towers taught us that when you photograph the same category of thing repeatedly, using consistent parameters, you create a dataset. And datasets, turns out, are how we understand variation, evolution, and change over time.
I’ve seen this principle everywhere now, sometimes in surprising places.
Urban planners use typological photography to document architectural change—shooting the same street corner annually for decades, same time of day, same focal length. Environmental scientists photograph glaciers, coastlines, and forests this way, building visual timelines that communicate climate impact more viscerally than graphs ever could. There’s even a photographer, Ed Ruscha, who in 1966 published a book called “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”—just that, every single building, photographed systematically as he drove past. It sounds tedious, maybe even pointless. But it became one of the most influential artist books of the 20th century because it demonstrated that exhaustive, neutral documentation could reveal truths about urbanism, capitalism, and American culture that editorialized photography missed entirely.
The Paradox of Personality Through Systematic Repetition
Here’s what still gets me: typology photography is supposed to be impersonal, right? Objective. Scientific. But the more you look at typological projects, the more the photographer’s obsessions leak through. The Bechers chose industrial structures because they were disappearing—their project was as much elegy as archive. Taryn Simon’s “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” uses typological presentation to catalog things most Americans never see: a nuclear waste storage facility, a cryopreservation unit, a room of confiscated counterfeit goods. The systematic format makes the strangeness hit harder.
I guess it makes sense. Any choice about what to document systematically is inherently subjective. You’re declaring, “This category matters enough to deserve exhaustive attention.” And in that declaration, personality emerges—not despite the systematic approach, but because of it. Contemporary photographers have pushed this further: Rineke Dijkstra’s beach portrait series uses typological consistency (same beach, same diffuse light, similar poses) to highlight the achingly specific vulnerability of individual adolescents. The method creates the space for the subjects to be fully themselves, variations on a human theme.
Anyway, the influence keeps expanding. Instagram feeds organized around single subjects—doors of Dublin, manhole covers of Tokyo, reflections in puddles—are inadvertent typological projects. Google Street View is perhaps the largest typological archive ever created, documenting nearly every drivable surface on Earth with algorithmic consistency. We’re swimming in typological imagery now, often without recognizing it as such. The Bechers taught us that when you photograph things the same way over and over, you’re not being repetitive. You’re building a visual grammar. And once you have that grammar, you can finally start reading what the world has been trying to tell you all along.
