Karl Blossfeldt

(German, 1865–1932)

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer known for his magnified black-and-white images of plants and flowers. With his photographs, Blossfeldt revealed the sculptural qualities and textural details of each specimen. “The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form,” he once said. Born on June 13, 1865 in Schielo, Germany, as a teenager he apprenticed at the Art Ironworks and Foundry in Mägdesprung, Germany. In 1881, Blossfeldt moved to Berlin to study ornamental design at the Royal School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. Despite having never trained as a photographer, he began making his own cameras and fitting them with magnifying lenses. As a professor of design at his alma mater, the artist used botanical images as an aid to teach his students about the ornamentation found in nature. By the 1920s, Blossfeldt’s works had gained him praise from the Neue Sachlichkeit photographers August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch, as well as the writer Walter Benjamin. The artist’s book Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) (1928)—despite its intention to merely function as a teaching aid—was quickly lauded as an important work of art. He died on December 9, 1932 in Berlin, Germany. Today, Blossfeldt’s works are held in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.