Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt lived and worked in Berlin as a sculptor, teacher and photographer. His close-up photographs of plants and seeds began as a teaching experiment, as he wanted to showcase the forms and patterns he found in the natural world as a means of inspiring his art students. Blossfeldt was fascinated by the sculptural forms present in botany, and created a camera that could magnify his subjects up to thirty times their actual size to emphasize their abstract and beautiful structures. Blossfeldt was in his 60s when his photographs of magnified plants were discovered and exhibited by an influential gallery owner. From the late 1920s his work was celebrated beyond academic circles, and is today considered an important and influential body of work in the development of photography.