Karl Blossfeldt: The working collages

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) achieved overnight fame in the late 1920s with the first publication of his photographs of plants. They immediately gave him the status of a pioneer of New Objectivity--an innovative moevement in art and photography of the 1920s and 1930s. Blossfeldt, however, was neither a trained photographer nor a botanist. He was a sculptor and art professor who did his photographic work to generate teaching material for his students. In 1977, sixty-one previously unknown collages were discoered in Blossfeldt's estate, in virtually mint condition, of photographic contact prints arranged on large cardboard sheets. Blossfeldt apparently used them to study the relation and similarity of the photographs and to compare them graphically and aesthetically. On some collages Blossfeldt had made marks or handwritten notations. Others show lines for cropping. All collages are reproduced in four colors. Introducing the book is an essay by Swiss art historian Ulrike Meyer Stump.