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Vintage gelatin silver print. 29.6 x 11.9 cm. Signed and inscribed 'Originalabzug von Karl Blossfeldt', 'Equisetum hyemale (publiz. in Urformen der Kunst pl. 2) ganze Form' and '25 x vergr.' in pencil by Jürgen Wilde as well as with the 'Nachlass Karl Blossfeldt / Archiv Wilde Köln' stamp on the verso. - Small retouching in the upper area of the image. The corners each with tiny pinhole. Matted. Provenance: Galerie Wilde, Cologne; Werner Bokelberg collection, Hamburg; Rolf Mayer collection, Stuttgart Literature: Ann und Jürgen Wilde (ed.), Karl Blossfeldt. Fotografie, Ostfildern 1998, ill. p. 26 (variant) Blossfeldt created over 6,000 photographic studies of plants. He did so as part of his thirty-year lectureship in Berlin, at the 'Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums' (College of the Royal Museum of Art and Craft), later to be renamed 'Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst' (United Governmental Schools of Liberal and Applied Arts). This is where, from 1899, Blossfeldt taught 'Modelling of Living Plants' as a subject. Blossfeldt never saw himself as a photographer, but only used photography to make the graphic and sculptural properties of the researched­ plants visible to the human eye. He took most of his photographs under identical lighting conditions, using a simple plate camera which he had made himself. To illustrate and underline the archetypal 'Urform' (original form) of each subject and to enhance its monumental impact, he opted for extreme enlargements, accepting the resulting fuzziness, while also using a neutral background to isolate the subject, fragmenting the subject and composing the photograph symmetrically in relation to its axis. In the 1920s Blossfeldt's strict, methodical procedure and his specific understanding of imagery earned him substantial recognition as a representative of Neo-Objectivist Photography. This horsetail plant with its morphological similarity to arrangements of columns in antiquity is the ideal embodiment of what Walter Benjamin called 'vegetabilische Stilform' (vegetation style). The shoot and stem of this plant at its various stages form a thematic emphasis in his illustrated book 'Urformen der Kunst' (Original Forms of Art), published in 1928. The print shown here is a 25-fold enlargement of the tip of a winter horse tail, a detail from the plant study in Illustration 2 in 'Urformen der Kunst'. Whereas, in his lessons, Blossfeldt mainly used transparent slides of his photographs, his paper prints - pinned to the walls of his institute - were used by his students as models for their drawings. The archives of the 'Hochschule der Künste' (College of Arts) in Berlin contain a collection of similar vintage prints from Blossfeldt's teaching resources which match this print in their formal aesthetic qualities, paper dimensions and even pin holes. (See Akademie der Künste (ed.), Karl Blossfeldt. Licht an der Grenze des Sichtbaren - Die Sammlung der Blossfeldt-Fotografien in der Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Munich et al. 1999)