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| Perspectives by James Small was at Clotworthy House, Antrim, August, 1998. Karl Blossfeldt was published by Taschen. |
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| View photographs accompanying this review |
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| Other articles by Siún Hanrahan |
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| Different Perspectives |
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| The exhibition at Clotworthy House in Antrim, 'Perspectives', presents James Small's photographic record of the botanical world just beyond the discernment of the naked eye. Born in Scotland in 1889, Small qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist and came to Belfast in 1920, where he was Professor of Botany in Queen's University for 34 years. |
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| The 42 Black and White photographs comprising this exhibition present the structure and behaviour of plants at low levels of magnification. They reveal Small's fascination with the botanical world to be found between what can be seen with the naked eye and what can be seen using the expert's compound microscope. As revealed by Small, this world is dramatic. |
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| Images such as that of an old flowering Dandelion head have a crisp sculptural impact - the twist of the withered florets give a contrapossto effect. Others, such as that showing the exposed style and stamen of a Rhododendron, are languidly sensuous. Several of the images are even mildly threatening - the explosive spore capsule of the Liverwort reveals a tangle of filaments (elaters) and an encroaching amorphousness. |
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| The impact of Small's images is achieved through composition and dramatic tonal contrast. The backgrounds used are plain or lightly textured and the plant sections are free from extraneous detail. Given that Small used these images as teaching aids, the elegant simplicity of their composition may be accounted for in terms of clearly revealing the specimen being recorded. Nonetheless, the beauty of Small's images belies such a simple account. While the intellectual pleasure afforded by an excellent example of a particular species certainly informed Small's construction of his images, beauty also seems to have played a part. The boldness of Small's photographs is surely inspired by an aesthetic appreciation of Nature. (Indeed, it has been argued that considerations of beauty, by engaging the imagination, play a part in the persuasiveness and accessibility of scientific ideas.) |
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| In addition to re-animating any flagging appreciation of Nature's beauty, Small's images are beautiful in their own right. That is, Small's images are interesting quite apart from their reference to nature - they succeed in engaging the imagination when viewed as images with no other aim than to engage the viewer. While one wonders what Small would have made of such an exhibition, his images survive their unforeseen transfer from the domain of science to the domain of art. |
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| Such shifts in domain, and the changes in meaning they entail, are not wholly unprecedented. The images of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) experienced a transformation. Born in the Harz Mountains in central Germany, Blossfeldt produced models for drawing classes in one of the leading colleges for budding industrial designers. To this end, Blossfeldt systematically photographed plants in accordance with the tradition of plant drawing - that is, the plant was trimmed and mounted before a uniform background. For Blossfeldt, as for Small, the photographs represented nothing more than teaching material. Blossfeldt sought to demonstrate to his students that the best solutions for industrial design had already been anticipated in nature. By 1926, however, Blossfeldt's photographs were being exhibited, after 1930 his work was represented in most major photographic exhibitions and annuals, and once photography was accepted as an art form in its own right, in the mid-1970s, Blossfeldt's work achieved international recognition. |
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| An impressive selection of Blossfeldt's thousands of photographs - featuring flowers, buds, branched stems, seed capsules - is presented in a new Taschen publication. Technically, a better photographer than Small (Blossfeldt achieved a sharp focus in a greater depth of field than did Small), Blossfeldt's approach to his botanical subjects was also more stylised. His preferred camera angle was level with the subject, he seldom took an overhead or diagonal view and, at a time when ornamentation was almost compulsory, his stark exposures were a revelation. The impact of the resultant images was such that Blossfeldt's approach emerged as a stylistic principle in object photography. Indeed, traces of Blossfeldt's influence may be found in the work of such diverse contemporary photographers as Robert Mapplethorpe, Christopher Williams, Joan Fontcuberta, Reinhardt Matz and Shomei Tomatsu. |
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| The selection of Blossfeldt's photographs presented by Taschen are emphatically structural and occasionally anthropomorphic with primitive undertones. The accompanying text does not make specific reference to any of the photographs but does contextualise them by tracing the evolution of Blossfeldt's career and indicating the social and artistic moment at which they arose. Some discussion of issues raised in the book - such as the impact of Blossfeldt's work upon contemporary art practitioners, or the impact of the shift in domain undergone by Blossfeldt's work upon questions regarding the meaning or objectivity of photographs - would have been useful. Nonetheless, the uncluttered elegance of the photographs make this a lovely book. |
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| While the shift in domain undergone by Blossfeldt's photographs is less startling than that undergone by Small's in both cases the photographs can be engaged with in at least three ways: 'intellectually' (mediated by botanical concepts in Small's case and by industrial design concepts in that of Blossfeldt), as glimpses of nature, or as artworks. And in both cases the words of Helmut Heissenbuttel (from the Taschen publication) are applicable: "Despite all the geometry and symmetry, despite the character of a plant classification book, all of a sudden something impenetrable, something mysterious comes through." |
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| Siún Hanrahan |
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