Plantstudie 1928

Karl Blossfeldt made this photograph called Plantstudie, no date, with, well, light and a camera. It's amazing, isn't it, how a plant, something so alive and growing, can be captured with such starkness? There’s a real process at play here. The shades of grey reveal so much about the texture, the way the light catches on the ridges of each pod-like form. You can almost feel the plant's surface. Blossfeldt wasn’t trying to pretty things up. He was all about the structure, the raw, almost architectural quality of nature. Look closely at the crown of the central stem. It's a complex network of lines and shadows. It reminds me of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed industrial structures with the same objective eye. There's an ongoing conversation about seeing and documenting. It's like art is just a lens, helping us to look closer, to see more than we thought was there.