Blossfeldt's large , heavily retouched and impeccably printed photographs show stylized details of plants in close-ups. There is always only one per image, floating rootless and shadowless against a white background. The plant specimens give a feeling of weightless -ness while also resembling fragments of architecture or wrought iron ornaments. It is as if they were precariously poised between art and nature.

Until the last few years we knew nothing of Blossfeldt's working methods. The discovery in his archive of sixty-one work sheets made of cut-up contact sheets glued onto grey cardboard gives us a window on Blossefeldt's creative process while he worked on his book from 1926 to 1928.

To a modern eye the collages acquire the quality of works of art: the eye travels along grids of multiple views of the same plant (or plants in the same family) printed on several types of photographic paper: the gray of the gelatine silver chloride play against the blue of the cyanotypes and the bronze of the bromide prints. Pencil notations and numbers in Blossefeldt's hand add to the visual appeal of the collages and evoke Brassai's contact print sheets for his study of Picasso's sculptures as well as conceptual artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher or Sol LeWitt.

This book also raises questions about artistic legacy : what happens to a body of work after the artist has disappeared? For Blossfeldt himself the collages were only part of a long working process , a stage in his metamorphosis of the plant into ornamental form. The profound shift of perspective within the art world that led to the appreciation and publication of his work sheets as a book would have been, to him, certainly incomprehensible and possibly horrifying. So we may ask if an artist must have control of his work, or if it ultimately belongs to all of us. As we are touched by this book's beauty, there is no easy answer.


-- Carole Naggar

Edited by Ann & Jûrgen Wilde
Introduction by Ulrike Meyer Stump
MIT Press, Cambridge
$38.50