Karl Blossfeldt, 1865-1932

kyle blosfeldt unwittingly became the artist of others making he set out with a quest a fascination with the structure of plants and their organic configuration which had little to do with his subsequent recognition as one

of the great artist photographers of the 20th century by training and profession he was not a photographer and had never published a photograph until in his early 60s and

yet his first photo book a formen der kunst published in 1928 is one of the most striking and most popular in photographic history

as a sculptor and university teacher from 1898 to 1931 blossfeld first taught modeling based on living plants at the old kunst verba museum in the gropius

building then at the berliner the next stat shulen where he remained until a year before his death using his photographs solely as teaching tools

collages to show his students in 1929 water benjamin wrote that blossfeld has done his part in that great examination of the perceptive inventory which will have an

unforeseeable effect on our conception of the world he has proven how right maholi nagi the pioneer of the new photography was when he said the limits

of photography are unforeseeable the illiterate of the future will not be he who cannot write but he who cannot take a photograph whether we speed up a plant's growth or show its form in a

40-fold enlargement in both cases a geyser of new images erupts at points of our existence where we would least expect it blossfeld goes

down in benjamin's kleiner gashita to photography as a major authority of the optical unconscious equal importance to ajay sander and germain cruel and along

with these a defender of fortress objectivity his work was picked up by the surrealists ranked amongst the pioneers of new objectivity and became a

key model for the typologies school of contemporary german photography you