karl blossfeldt and others

I was trawling through the library the other day looking for Macro, botanical & weed photography and I came across the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt.

His story is fascinating - labelled a pioneer in botanical photography he was one of the first to devote his lifetime to photographing plants way back in the early 1900's using a home made camera.

What I find even more fascinating and relevant to me and my project is that he wasn't photographing them for a love of photography or even the love of the individual plant. He was interested purely in the patterns in nature.

It wasn't till after his death in 1932 and then far later in the mid 1970's when photography was finally accepted as a serious art form were his images were revisited and he was pronounced an true artist of his time.

Of course he had a valid and useful reason why he photographed so many plants for so long. He was compiling a catalogue for use in casting purposes for industrial designs and therefore tended to focus on only the interesting patterns each plant supplied, so they could be used as motifs for ornamental design or converted into scroll work and castings. He later went onto teach and used his extensive collection of photographs to teach his methods.

You can really see how his photographs must have influenced the scroll and ironwork of the period.

Quite a lot of his work was of weeds as well. Clearly he was someone who could recognise the beauty and pattern in all things and held no such discrimination back then which I find an interesting point. The image of his below was very exciting for me to come across as it is a Teasel leaf, which also features in my project. The square edges to the stems are very interesting and the line of thorns along the ridge of the leaves show up very well in the correct profile angle.

An interesting point to note was how I have was chosen to place my plants to photograph. I didn't spend a lot of time fussing over the placement. I preferred to almost to pick up a bunch put it in the jar and leave it how it sat. To do this is far more like nature than any type of contrived placement and manipulation by me. I don't like that kind of obvious placement in images. I instantly feel like I'm not looking a nature anymore, just a man made version of it. Although in Karl's work it was certainly a requirement to clearly access the pattern for his purposes as demonstrated below:

This next one was an interesting artist to come across. Her name is Joan Fontcuberta and she published a book called Herbarium in 1985 in Germany. She is said to be heavily influenced by Karl Blossfeldt but her contribution work focused on taking plants apart and then putting them make together in quirky and unusual combinations and photographing them as Karl has done. Front on with even lighting and functional framing.  She then came up with humorous latin names to go with her new creations (I'm lucky to have a bit of botanical latin education or I would not have picked that up!) This weedy thistle of hers below has had the addition of some rose thorns stabbed in the opposite way.

Joan Fontcuberta, Braohypoda frustrata, 1985

The next artist was one Ruth suggested I look at: Nick Knight and his book 'Flora'. He had the huge honour of spending 3 years going through the Natural History Museum Archives in London, with full access to their collections. Here is one of the weeds he captured. He took these images in 1997 but the specimen itself was collected in 1895! Incredible! He was of course limited just to the pressed dried placement of the plants and I'm pretty sure he used a scanner to capture them as many have various combined shades of colour depending on how the light came through and they overlapped. This got me thinking with respect to my lighting that I should trial back-lighting with the thinner papery plants of my specimens to try and capture the light passing through them.

Nick Knight, Eryngium foetidum, specimen collected in 1895.

And the last artist I found was Tom Baril with his beautiful book 'Botanica' published recently in 2000. The reason I was drawn to his work is the low lighting methods he has used throughout his work. Not focusing on weeds but rather the more alive and classically beautiful plants and flowers such as this Hosta below. The dark moody lighting is very dramatic thought and similiar to what I'm hoping to achieve although the framing is too wide and obvious for me. Although it does do each of his chosen plants wonderful justice to be recognised and appreciated. The detail in the film and colour of them is so stunningly beautiful.

Tom Baril, Hosta, Botanica, 2000.