Image Studio: Artists: week 4 two

Karl Blossfeldt (June 13, 1865 – December 9, 1932 - age 67) was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as, Urformen der Kunst, He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the way in which plants grow. He believed that 'the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.
Blossfeldt made many of his photographs with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its size, revealing details within a plant's natural structure. Appointed a teaching post at the Institute of Royal Arts Museum in 1898 (and where he remained until 1930), he established an archive for his photographs. Blossfeldt never received formal training in photography. Blossfeldt developed a series of homemade cameras that allowed him to photograph plant surfaces in unprecedented magnified detail. This reflected his enduring interest in the repetitive patterns found in nature's textures and forms.