Art Forms in Nature 34 1928

Karl Blossfeldt made this photograph, Art Forms in Nature 34, sometime before his death in 1932. This arresting close-up of botanical specimens epitomizes the New Objectivity movement in Germany between the wars. It’s part of a larger project, a personal archive of plant forms he used as teaching aids. Now, photography had long been imagined as a tool to expand scientific knowledge, but here Blossfeldt elevates the medium to art, while also treating art as a form of scientific observation. He presents natural forms in a way that emphasizes their underlying structures. They are decontextualized, stripped of any trace of location or atmosphere and set against a neutral background. In their stark clarity, the plants resemble architectural models or industrial designs. We can understand Blossfeldt's photographs as part of a broader cultural impulse after World War One to find order and rationality in the visible world. To learn more, look into publications like “Die Neue Sachlichkeit” by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub. By treating art as a historical artifact, we can better understand its meaning within a specific time and place.