Karl Blossfeldt, photographer

Michael Pollan, in his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, mentions in passing Karl Blossfeldt, an "early-twentieth-century German photographer whose portraits of stems and buds and flowers make them look like they'd been cast in iron." This, I had to see. 

Blossfeldt taught sculpture at the Royal School of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin from 1892 to 1932, focusing on plant forms. He published two books of photographs, Urformen der Kunst (Archetypal forms of art, 1929) and Wundergarten der Natur (The wondergarden of nature, 1932). He was well known in his day, and received the support of critics such as Walter Benjamin as well as artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New realism) and the Paris surrealists. 

Here are some of his images, starting with the plant I am currently reading about:

Papaver orientalis
(oriental poppy)

Acer rucinerve
(red-vein maple)

Chrysanthemum parthenium
(feverfew)

Acanthus mollis
(bear's breeches; bracteoles with flowers removed)

Adiantum pedatum
(northern maidenhair fern)

Eryngium bourgatii
(Mediterranean sea holly)

Abutilon sp.
(mallow)

Anemone blanda
(windflower)

And on a completely unrelated note—except insofar as the second section of Pollan's book is on caffeine, and the third on mescaline—I leave you with this amusing and interesting article on the effects of various drugs on the weavings of spiders. Can you guess, in the following illustration, which one caffeine is responsible for? Or mescaline?

Answers: #s 5 and 6, respectively. The other drugs represented are marijuana (#2), chloral hydrate, a heavy sedative (#3), and benzedrine (#4), while #1 is the web of a happy and well-adjusted spider. Or at least one that hasn't been fed any chemicals lately...