Throughout the modern era, photography has been enlisted not only to
document but also to classify the world and its people. Its status
bolstered by a popular belief in the scientific objectivity of
photographic evidence, photography has been used, from the earliest days
of the medium, to produce and organize knowledge about the external
world.
Published to accompany the exhibition The Order of Things: Photography
from The Walther Collection, this catalogue investigates the production
and uses of serial portraiture, vernacular imagery, architectural
surveys and time-based performance in photography from the 1880s to the
present, bringing together works by artists from Europe, Africa, Asia
and North America.
Setting early modernist photographers Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander
in dialogue with contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Nobuyoshi
Araki, Richard Avedon, Zanele Muholi, Stephen Shore and Zhuang Huan,
The Order of Things illustrates how typological methods in photography
have developed around the globe. Edited by Brian Wallis, The Order of
Things includes texts by Geoffrey Batchen, Tina Campt, Christopher
Phillips, George Baker, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michael
Jennings, Ulrike Schneider, Allan Sekula and Joel Smith.
