Karl blossfeldt biography artist troy

Karl Blossfeldt — was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. In Blossfeldt received a scholarship to study in Rome under Moritz Meurer, a decorative artist and professor of ornament and design. Along with several other assistants, Blossfeldt created and photographed casts of botanical specimens in and around Rome.

He continued to work with Meurer through and traveled beyond Italy to North Africa and Greece to collect specimens. Beginning in Blossfeldt taught design at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts Kunstgewerbeschule , and in he became professor emeritus. There he established a plant photography archive that he used to teach his students about design and patterns found in nature.

Blossfeldt had no formal training as a photographer and used homemade cameras that he outfitted with lenses capable of magnifying his subjects up to 30 times their natural size.

Karl Blossfeldt's monochrome photographs present semiabstracted studies of diverse flora, bridging the 19th- and 20th-century worlds of image-making and.

The use of magnification resulted in images of extreme detail and clarity. With the precision of a botanist, Blossfeldt photographed the natural world for scientific and pedagogical purposes and inadvertently became a modern artist. His work was considered the forerunner to Neue Sachlichkeit photography, which favoured sharply focused documentary images.

The first of his three photo books the other two were Wundergarten der Natur, ; and Wunder in der Natur, , the last published posthumously , it was enormously successful and remains one of the most-significant photo books of the 20th century. Related Posts.

Blossfeldt was feted as an important photographer.

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