['Plant Studies', 'Urformen der Kunst: photographische Pflanzenbilder'] 1928

Karl Blossfeldt made this photogravure, ‘Plant Studies’, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. It’s one of his magnified plant portraits, and the image really makes me think about the act of close looking. The plant is centered and fills the frame, and I can imagine Blossfeldt making many exposures, tweaking the lighting to bring out this leaf’s intricate network of veins. The precision here is amazing, the kind of thing you can only achieve after countless hours in the darkroom. I love the subtle tonal variations, how the light graces the leaf's surface, creating shadows that add depth and dimension. There's a sculptural quality to it, almost like a Brancusi or Arp sculpture rendered in grayscale. I'm sure Blossfeldt would have been familiar with the work of the New Objectivity painters who were working at the same time as him, and who were all interested in new ways of seeing and representing. It reminds us that art is always in dialogue, with artists borrowing and riffing off each other's ideas across time.