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Background information
"When Karl BLOSSFELDT published 'Art Forms in Nature' in 1928, he made photographic history and became an instant celebrity. The public loved the world of tiny shapes and organic monumentality revealed in his enlargements of flowers and seeds, stems and leaves. Yet he did not consider himself a photographer. He produced his beautiful studies of plant forms to illustrate the courses he taught on architecture at Berlin's School of Arts and Crafts. For 30 years he used the same painstaking method. He would make long journeys into the countryside to select his specimens, which tended to be hardy weeds rather than cultivated flowers. He then prepared them against a neutral cardboard background in various ways designed to avoid camera shake, then photographed in extreme close-up with a homemade plate camera equipped with a very long bellows. Plants gave Blossfeldt a constant supply of graceful designs in which organic growth modified the basic symmetry of natural forms. Unfurling ferns resemble Gothic tracery or a bishop's crosier, a seed pod suggests a medieval weapon, reed stems look like skyscrapers.
Content
This beautifully produced book 'Karl Blossfeldt. 1865-1932', edited by Hans Christian Adam contains 348 illustrations, including all of the plates in his three books of 1928, 1932, and 1942 plus thirty large unpublished images made in his childhood home in the Harz Mountains of Germany. His visual discoveries transport viewers into a fairyland of art deco patterns and shapes; every page of this book is a delightful surprise." (© John Stevenson, Del Library Journal)
In the press
"Karl BLOSSFELDT, August SANDER, and Edward WESTON all blossomed with the publication of their first books around 1930, were direct in their use of the medium, and rank among photography's defining masters. Yet they each had a unique style and focused on distinct subject matter, making their works instantly recognizable. Germans August SANDER and Karl BLOSSFELDT pioneered the 'new objectivity' with their massive survey projects. Karl BLOSSFELDT originally photographed plant specimens to help his students in art school with copying natural forms. But with the publication of 'Art Forms in Nature' (1928), containing sixty of these photogravures, he was hailed as master and went on to publish two more acclaimed compendia. The photography writer Hans Christian Adam offers stunning reproductions of all the prints found in all three volumes by Karl BLOSSFELDT as well as the original essays from the time. The book should be part in all libraries with a serious interest in photography; the entire series would be at home in any academic institution." (Doug McClemont)