Selection of Original Prints from the Archive of Karl Blossfeldt at Foam

Written by Paul Manfried Saturday, 03 July 2010 22:30

AMSTERDAM.- Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents a selection of original prints from the archive of Karl Blossfeldt. Blossfeldt (b. Germany, 1865) was self-taught and had kept up a keen interest in nature since boyhood. As a sculptor and modeller at an art foundry, he drew inspiration from flowers and plants for decorative motifs. In the 1890s his career took a new direction when he joined a study project in Italy led by Moritz Meurer. It was then that Blossfeldt began to systematically collect and photograph plants.  On exhibition at Foam unti 22 August.

This documentation was for artistic use rather than scientific. Blossfeldt employed photography to study so-called primal forms from nature. Like his mentor Meurer, he wanted these forms to provide a source of ideas for architects, painters and graphic artists. Blossfeldt used photos from his archive as teaching material in his lectures at Berlin’s School of Applied Arts. In the course of his life he produced around six thousand photos.

Blossfeldt photographed flowers and plants with large cameras that he built himself. He preferred wild plants and weeds, since these showed nature’s primal forms far better than cultivated flowers and plants. He also documented flora at various stages of development. Blossfeldt cut unnecessary twigs and leaves away, before photographing his specimens close up against a neutral background. This enabled him to register their regular geometrical patterns. Blossfeldt is considered among the artists of the New Objectivity movement.

Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said, "The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."

Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule,Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.

It was only later in life that Blossfeldt received recognition as a photographer. In 1926, Berlin’s Nierendorf Gallery hosted Blossfeldt’s first exhibition and published a volume entitled Urformen der Kunst in 1928. It was an international success and is considered a seminal work in the development of photography. A second book, Wundergarten der Natur, appeared in 1932. Blossfeldt was not to enjoy his success for long, he died that same year.  Visit : http://www.foam.nl/

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