In bloom, Karl Blossfeldt’s rendition of the flower allures the viewer into its multi-layered patterns brought to fragrance in black and white. One wonders about the art of animating it, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when cameras were still home-made such as Blossfeldt’s. “His photographs are firmly situated within a modernist aesthetic that prized lines, silhouettes and unusual perspectives. The detail that is found embedded in them was enabled by Blossfeldt’s self-constructed home-made camera lenses that magnified up to thirty times,” explains Nathaniel Gaskell, curator of Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, currently on view at Tasveer. “Though technological limitations at the time would indicate that Blossfeldt didn’t particularly ‘animate’ his two-dimensional photographs, his pictures, such as the blooming flower, produce such an affect through a vision that used devices such as depth of field and composition to create a different way of seeing things (in this case plant structures). If Blossfeldt had access to the kind of technology we have today, perhaps one could expect an exaggeration of this tendency to reproduce accurate and realistically, a hallmark of modernism as it moved away from pictorialism,” he adds.
With his frames focussing on patterns in nature, realism makes Blossfeldt’s images relevant to the architectural and design fraternity, apart from connoisseurs of art. “While floral motifs have long been part of architectural and interior design, Blossfeldt’s photographs magnify and focus on their underlying structures, prompting us toward the potential they offer to the way in which design is engineered, rather than as merely decorative leitmotifs. The abstract shapes and geometric designs that are repeatedly highlighted in these images are adaptable to all kinds of structural, artistic and engineering design. Blossfeldt, who was both a student and professor of design, intended for these photographs to be pedagogical tools, their primary function for many years until he published his book,” explains Nathaniel.
Blossfeldt’s genre of imagery finds pertinence in the academics of photography, which confluences ‘scientific empiricism and sculptural forms with design mechanics and surreal compositions’. Drawing interest towards Blossfeldt’s photographic methodologies, Tasveer, supported by Vacheron Constantin and The Singleton of Glen Ord, has published a catalogue of Blossfeldt’s works in tandem with the exhibition. “The book that carries over forty illustrations of the beautiful magnified plant portraits, has a short accompanying foreword that provides context with reference to Blossfeldt and the photographs as also Urformen Der Kunst or Art Forms in Nature - the first time these photographs were published. It is intended as both a collectible and keepsake that can be referenced and revisited - carrying the reproductions with the details and plate numbers as in the original 1928 edition of the Urformen Der Kunst - as also a resource as Blossfeldt originally intended,” says Nathaniel.
Into the modern age, Blossfeldt’s images are a celebration of nature and an accent on innovation through to graphics and design.
Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature will be on view at Tasveer till October 31, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday.