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Dipasacus laciniatus (Teasel) Cajophora lateritia, Loasaceae (loasa) Born in 1865, German photographer Karl Blossfeldt documented over 6000 plants over a span of thirty years up to his death in 1932. Blossfeldt had training as a metal craftsman as well as an academic art education, and combined these disciplines to demonstrate how the best constructions in industry had been anticipated in nature. Blossfeldt’s images indeed reveal fundamental structures of the natural world and a relationship to artistic form. By effectively isolating, fragmenting and enlarging certain plant details and motifs, Blossfeldt’s starkly modern images reveal complex structures and intricacies. He gathered plants from the countryside outside Berlin and Rome, bringing them to his studio to document using natural light and a homemade medium-format camera with glass negatives. Blossfeldt’s intensely analytical herbarium, originally used as teaching material, has been influential to generations of artists, architects and designers. His photographs had a prominent place in the avant-garde exhibition “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart in 1929, the same year his book “Urformen der Kunst”, (Art forms in nature) was released by renowned architectural publishing house Verlag Ernst Wasmuth A.G. These photogravures are from this rare, limited edition publication, which has been reprinted many times since. The photogravure quality of this 1929 edition is considered the best.
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