Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932)

 Who is Karl Blossfeldt?

Karl Blossfeldt was a German Photorapher who was best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things. His unique collection of plant portraits exhume the beautifully simple yet complex view within a plant’s natural structure.

He believed that ‘the plant must be valued as a totally artisitc and architechtural structure’.

To do this, Blossfeldt developed a series of homemade cameras which enabled him to magnify the subject thirty times closer which showed the details of the plant.

As a response to Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs, I was inspired by his ideas to also do a close-up of a plant where i can exhibit their wonderful details such as the repitition of patterns.

Contact Sheet

Chosen Images

To produce these images of the plants, I first decided to place them on a white A4 paper which I used to create a white background. This allowed me to recreate the technique of what Blossfeldt used to take his beautifully detailed photographs of plants.

After this, I then continued to enhance my images to make sure the plants stand out. I did this through increasing the brightness as well as contrast of the images.

Here are the results:

 

 

 

Visual ideas

As a response to Karl Blossfeldt’s work, I decided to take photographs of these random plants I found. As seen from the examples of Blossfeldt’s works, all his photographs are black and white and also very simplisctic in nature. Therefore as a result, I thought of manipulating my photographs in photoshop to add colour into the picture to make the plants stand out more as well as to make the images look more modern.

Here are the results: