BLOSSFELDT, Karl - Cees Nooteboom. Karl Blossfeldt und das Auge Allahs

Personal statement by the Dutch writer Cess Nooteboom

"... and I suddenly imagined the joy that BLOSSFELDT must have felt in his work as a monk. He knew what he was doing, he looked into the mystery of things because he wanted to teach and not enchant. And yet you can't escape the magic ..." (Cees NOOTEBOOM)

Background information

Trained in sculpture and drawing and a sensitive and talented autodidact in photography, Karl BLOSSFELDT was a teacher at the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts from 1898 to 1930. In order to train his students' aesthetic sensibilities and develop their feeling for ornamentation, he photographed parts of freshly cut plants in natural light and enlarged the negatives by up to twelve times the size of the original.
In the face of enlarged plant images, Cees Nooteboom begins to philosophize about the boundary between the observation of nature and artistic impetus, poses questions about the Creator and the Big Bang and identifies the artifice of enlargement as the actual catalyst that allows the structure to come to the fore and leads into the realm of sheer aesthetics. For Nooteboom, Karl BLOSSFELDT saw his plants with the 'eye of Allah' - an allusion to a story by Rudyard Kipling - and thus created 'a new grammar of seeing'.

Content

The volume 'Karl Blossfeldt und das Auge Allahs. Warum wir nicht aufhören können, die Natur wie eine Schöpfung anzusehen' (Karl Blossfeldt and the Eye of Allah. Why we can't stop looking at nature like a creation) by Cees Nooteboom contains twenty-six of Karl BLOSSFELDT's most beautiful photographs as well as a brilliant essay on his plant photographs." (slightly adapted publisher's text, © Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 2017)

About German photographer Karl BLOSSFELDT (1865-1932)

Photo books by and about the work of Karl BLOSSFELDT

About the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom