Originally the nature studies which Blossfeldt took between 1890 and 1932 served as opinion objects for his lesson at the art trade school in Berlin. Understanding the form variety of the nature and making this fertile for the artistic work – this was it what Blossfeldt wanted to arrange for his pupils. So he took in the course of the years more than one thousand pictures. In 1926 the renowned owner of a gallery Karl Nierendorf discovered Blossfeldt's work, presumably during an exhibition in the art trade school and presented it in Berlin.
The real breakthrough was as Blossfeldt published two years later his first book "Urformen der Kunst" (eng.: "Art Forms In Nature").
Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German photographer. Trained as a sculptor he was also an amateur botanist, fascinated by the underlying structures of nature.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin declared that Karl Blossfeldt ‘has played his part in that great examination of the inventory of perception, which will have an unforeseeable effect on our conception of the world’.
Over three decades, Blossfeldt produced 6,000 photo-graphs, using a homemade camera and lens that could magnify a subject by 30 times, to capture the micro-cosmic aesthetic of his specimens.
Blossfeldt was celebrated for discovering a hitherto ‘unknown universe’ and for his exemplary technical feats as a photographer.
Blossfeldt was a photographer that has taken black and white pictures of objects, most of them were plants. The photos show the whole object rarely.
Three spears, notched, the tops into each other intertwined. Or perhaps a part of a garden fence made of metal? Both wrong. What at first sight looks done like of human hand, nobody other than the nature has made this: Three buds of hortensia flowers, 12 times bigger than normally. Blossfeldt inspired the artists of the surrealism, even though Blossfeldt wasn’t a trained photographer.
Most of his pictures are very detailed and the objects doesn't seem like plants. They are looking more like things made of metal.
From Blossfeldt's work I would like to take the way he managed to let plants not look like plants but as objects. He managed also to show details which nobody could see with a naked eye. I would like to do this also in my Mini Task.