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These Black-and-White Plant Photos From the 1920s Are Simply Stunning
Karl Blossfeldt was never formally trained as a photographer, but he adapted his own special cameras to capture plants like no one before or since
Born in 1865, Karl Blossfeldt was an artist and professor who worked in Berlin, Germany. His best known work was photography, though he received no formal training for it. These stunning photos were made using Blossfeldt’s homemade cameras which could magnify plants up to 30 times their original size, resulting in stark, sharp, architectural prints of stalks, flowers, twigs, leaves, and seeds. In his words, he hoped that these pictures could “reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.”
It may not be surprising to learn that Blossfeldt was also a sculptor, as the eye of these photos seems to be trained on plants from a sculptor’s perspective, so intensely focused on texture, weight, and balance…
