Image: Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, Detroit
Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan, has published a feature examining how Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs of plant forms helped reshape modern photography, design and visual culture. ‘Karl Blossfeldt and the Birth of Modern Photography’ presents the work of the German photographer as something between scientific documentation, design instruction and autonomous art, while also detailing the bookstore’s historical holdings of Blossfeldt-related material.
Blossfeldt, who lived from 1865 to 1932, did not train as a conventional fine-art photographer. His career was rooted in design education, and from 1898 until 1930 he taught at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbeschule. He assembled a large photographic archive of plants and plant parts as a teaching resource, providing students with examples of structures that could be translated into drawing, sculpture, metalwork and ornament.
The feature describes Blossfeldt’s method as systematic rather than pictorial. He isolated leaves, seed pods, tendrils, buds and stems against stark backgrounds, removing elements that were not necessary to the study of form. To achieve close views, he engineered large-format cameras with exceptionally long bellows, allowing botanical details to be magnified by as much as 30 times. Diffuse studio lighting and sharp focus emphasized contours, textures, symmetry, rhythm and geometry.
That approach placed the photographs within the debates surrounding modernism and the emerging idea of photography as an objective visual instrument. Blossfeldt’s first major book, ‘Urformen der Kunst’, was published in Berlin in 1928 with 120 photogravure plates reproducing 164 photographs. The publication presented images originally intended as teaching documents as a unified artistic vision. A second volume, ‘Wundergarten der Natur’, followed in 1932, the year of Blossfeldt’s death.
The Book Beat essay also traces the critical and exhibition history surrounding the photographs. Karl Nierendorf presented Blossfeldt’s work as fine art at his Berlin gallery in 1926, including it in a dialogue with African sculpture. Walter Benjamin encountered that exhibition and later wrote about Blossfeldt in ‘News About Flowers’ and ‘A Short History of Photography’, arguing that magnification revealed structures inaccessible to ordinary vision. The feature contrasts Benjamin’s emphasis on discovery with Georges Bataille’s more unsettling reading of the enlarged botanical forms in the 1929 journal ‘Documents’.
Blossfeldt’s images circulated internationally through several kinds of publications and photographic objects. The feature highlights ‘First Forms of Art. Forty Double Plates. Examples from the Living Plant World’, an American edition published by H. C. Perleberg in Philadelphia sometime between approximately 1929 and 1932. Unlike the larger photogravure books issued by Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, the portfolio contained 40 double plates with 103 gelatin-silver reproduction photographs and was also intended as teaching material.
Book Beat says it acquired a set of the Perleberg edition at auction during the 1980s. From 1987 to 2016, the store maintained a small backroom gallery where it exhibited and sold historical photographs, prints, artists’ books, folk art and related material. It periodically showed and sold selections of Blossfeldt photographs, and says that several remaining examples—including images identified as ‘Fiddlehead and Screwtree’, ‘Milkweed’, ‘Salvia & Flower Bud’, ‘Heather’ and ‘Thistle and Seed Head’—are currently being offered online. The store is also assembling a selection of Blossfeldt monographs and reference books for its backroom.
