As Art Nouveau is heavily influenced by botanical design I felt it only right to touch on Karl Blossfeldt’s work. He was a German photographer, sculptor and teacher who used his photographs as drawing aids. He believed that ‘the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure’. For most of his work he used a homemade camera that could magnify a subject up to 30 times its size. This gave him the ability to capture a great amount of detail. If i were to try and recreate something like this I would use a macro lens and try and light it high key to produce a crisp white background so as not to detract from my images.

I feel his photos are a brilliant representation of structural form. I have used Blossfeldt’s work as inspiration in my fashion and textiles course as well. Whilst my work has developed since looking at his work having seen the way that has developed, introducing the the organic female form is something I could look at with his work. An interesting idea could be to look at the female form taking poses from the botanical imagery.It would be interesting to see if anything like this has already been done. It is definitely one I will have to look into further.

Whilst this is drifting from my original idea of looking at Art Nouveau I could bring it back and tie it with my fashion even further by using outfits more similar to those seen in Mucha’s work. Using the clothing styles found in Mucha’s work could be beneficial in creating some of the structured shapes found in Blossfeldt’s imagery.

From the research I have done so far I intend to use several different models to represent the different kinds of plant. Whilst this may be difficult I can work in the studio and photograph each one individually. It might be interesting to use a 4×5 camera in order to capture a similar level of detail to that found in Blossfeldt’s work. Using the white background might be a touch boring so I could combine the more intricate backgrounds found in Mucha’s work with the poses I can take from Blossfelt’s.