Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt is best known for his precise, almost sculptural photographs of plants, yet his artistic path began in a very different place. He trained as a sculptor, completing apprenticeships at an ironworks and foundry in Mägdesprung and later at the Kunstgewerbeschule — the applied arts school of Berlin — from 1884 to 1890. Between 1890 and 1896 he traveled through Italy, Greece, and North Africa while working for the artist and teacher Moritz Meurer, who believed that natural forms served as the foundation for artistic design.

From 1898 until 1930, Blossfeldt taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. During these decades he created an extensive archive of plant photographs, using them as teaching tools to demonstrate the underlying structures and rhythms of organic forms. Though he had no formal photographic training, he engineered his own cameras to achieve extraordinary magnification, capturing plant surfaces with a clarity that was unmatched at the time.

Blossfeldt’s images gained widespread attention in the mid-1920s, thanks in part to the support of gallerist Karl Nierendorf, who exhibited his photographs alongside African sculptures in 1926. Nierendorf later published Blossfeldt’s first major monograph, Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), in 1928. After the book’s success, Blossfeldt released a second volume, Wundergarten der Natur (The Magic Garden of Nature), in 1932.

The sharpness, objectivity, and seemingly scientific neutrality of his photographs resonated deeply with the New Vision movement in photography. His work became a central highlight of landmark exhibitions such as Fotografie der Gegenwart and Film und Foto, both staged in 1929, solidifying his influence on modernist visual culture.