Karl Blossfeldt: The Complete Published Work

Explore the oeuvre of one of the photography world’s premiere pioneers in Karl Blossfeldt: The Complete Published Work. A German sculpture and design professor at the turn of the twentieth century, Blossfeldt developed his own camera to capture countless close-up plant still life photographs over the course of over thirty years — mostly weeds and common plants, which he gathered himself while traipsing through the countryside. He originally intended for these portraits to be used as references for his students at Berlin’s Charlottenburg School of Arts and Craft, and so he carefully composed each specimen on a plain cardboard background, with only natural northern light for any sense of volume or dimension. The result of this unassuming project was a series of over six thousand stark, sculptural plant portraits, each with a mysterious, almost otherworldly sense of beauty that was wholly original. In 1929, shortly before the end of his life, Blossfeldt published just over a hundred of these snapshots in Urformen der Kunst, or Art Forms in Nature, for use as a teaching guide — but the book quickly gained renowned as a work of art in its own right and sparking an interest in his expansive body of work. Today, Blossfeldt is remembered as a leader in the medium, bridging the gap between the 19th- and 20th-century worlds of image-making with his distinctive, semi-abstractive works — a fact that would likely surprise no one more than Blossfeldt himself. Karl Blossfeldt: The Complete Published Work collects all known published images from the artist's catalog, capturing the quiet elegance and visual poetry of both his body of work and our natural world. A must have for photography fanatics and nature lovers alike.  •by Hans Christian Adam •hardcover •512 pages  Dimensions •6.5"W x 1.25"D x 8.75"H