Equisetum Hyemale

A professor at the Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin, Karl Blossfeldt made photographs not as art but as visual studies or pedagogical tools for the benefit of artists, designers, and architects. He believed that ornament constituted a pinnacle of human creative achievement, and that its basis lay in the natural patterns of plants and flowers. Blossfeldt collected and photographed plant specimens using a modified camera that could capture minute detail and published his images in Art Forms in Nature, an immediately popular book of 1928 that has remained nearly continuously in print until today. His unsentimental, closely cropped studies aligned with the New Objectivity movement then sweeping photography and fine art in central Europe.