The Key to a Hidden World

Upon its publication in Britain, Karl Blossfeldt's photo-album, Art Forms in Nature, was something of a publishing phenomenon, striking a chord with the general public and going through no fewer than three print-runs between 1929 and 1935. Featuring a suite of magnified photographs of flower heads, seeds and plant tendrils, the book's success powerfully represented the current of interest in close-up nature photography contemporaneously experienced in Britain. Indeed, between 1929 and 1939 a wide range of publications were released to popular acclaim that included lavish albumen or silver-gelatin prints of microscopic forms newly disclosed to the human eye through photomicrographic technology. At the same time, the embryonic documentary cinema movement capitalised upon public enthusiasm for scientific discovery by releasing a range of natural history films that made use of pioneering micro-cinematographic techniques. While the pan-European stimulus of photomicrography on avant-garde activity during the 1930s has been well documented by art historians, little work has been carried out on the social reception of photomicrography or on the specific cultural conditions under which close-up natural imagery was consumed in Britain. Framed around the unrivalled critical success of Blossfeldt's publication, this article will thus investigate the popularity of photomicrography and close-up nature photography in Britain between the world wars by analysing their promotion and reception. I would also like to thank Ann and Jürgen Wilde of the Karl Blossfeldt Archive for granting permission to reproduce the images by Karl Blossfeldt. Notes 1 – This account will use the term ‘photomicrography’ to define ‘the art, process or technique of producing photomicrographs’; namely, the photography of enlarged images of very small objects typically obtained via a microscope. While there is some precedence for this practice to be termed ‘microphotography’, generally speaking ‘microphotography’ refers to the ‘process or practice of making photographs of a very small size’. Although ‘microphotography’ can in certain instances refer to the ‘process or practice of producing a photographic reproduction of a microscopic image’, by and large this usage is ambiguous. To avoid any semantic ambiguity in this account ‘photomicrography’ will be used unless in the case of quotations where ‘microphotography’ is employed straightforwardly in the original text (see the entries for ‘microphotography’ and ‘photomicrography’ in the Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010). In this text, ‘close-up’ shall be generally used to describe photographs that only entail a small magnification (via close focus and lens extension) without the use of a microscope. ‘Macro-photograph’ is the word currently favoured for this kind of image but ‘close-up’ shall here be used for succinctness because ‘close-up’ had a particular currency in interwar photography publications. 2 – Hooke's text was actually intended as a popularly accessible book: see Jane Maienschein, ‘Cell Theory and Development’, in Companion to the History of Science, London and New York: Routledge 1990, 357. See also Robert Hooke, Micrographia or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, New York: Dover 1961. 3 – See, Peter Broks, Media Science Before the Great War, London: Macmillan 1996, 28–30. 4 – See Ann Thomas, ‘The Search For Pattern’, in Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997, 101. 5 – See Dawn Ades, ‘Little Things: Close-up in Photo and Film 1839–1963’, in Close-Up, Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery 2008, 9–60. 6 – See Jennifer Mundy, ‘Form and Creation: The Impact of the Biological Sciences on Modern Art’, in Creation: Modern Art and Nature, Edinburgh: SNGMA 1984 16–23; Jennifer Mundy, Biomorphism, PhD Dissertation, London: University of London 1986, 113–24; and Guitemie Maldonado, Le cercle et l'amibe, Paris: CTHS/INHA 2006, 209–96. 7 – Anonymous, ‘Art and Nature: A Review of “Art Forms in Nature”’, Times Literary Supplement (31 October 1929), 871. 8 – See Michael Whitworth, ‘The Clothbound Universe: Popular Physics Books, 1919–39’, Publishing History, 40 (1996), 53–4. 9 – Larry J. Schaaf, ‘Invention and Discovery: First Images’, in Beauty of Another Order, 26. 10 – Ann Thomas, ‘The Search For Pattern’, in Beauty of Another Order, 76–7. 11 – Anonymous, ‘The Progress of Science: Films of Living Cells, Study of Growth’, The Times (6 July 1931), 19. 12 – Anonymous, ‘Key To A Hidden World: New Light on the Infinitesimal, The Super-Microscope’, The Times (26 November 1938), 9. 13 – Ibid. 14 – See Anonymous, ‘Key to a Hidden World: New Light on the Infinitesimal, The Supermicroscope’, The Times (26 November 1938), 16. ‘The Nature of Things’ by William Bragg in the Listener included photomicrographs of snow crystals alongside schematic models of atomic structures (as, indeed, photomicrographs were often used as eye-catching illustrations in his articles for Nature). See Sir William Bragg, ‘Liquid Crystals’, Nature, 3360 (24 March 1934), 445–56. 15 – See Anonymous, ‘Pond Life on the Screen’, The Times (18 April 1939), 10. 16 – G. H. Saxon Mills, ‘Modern Photography: Its Development, Scope and Possibilities’, in Modern Photography, London: The Studio Ltd 1931, 4. 17 – ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Modern Photography, 1. 18 – See Photography Yearbook, London: Fountain Publications 1935, 266–9. 19 – Cyril Leeston Smith, ‘Present Day Technical Apparatus and its Applications’, in Modern Photography, 111–18. 20 – Trude Weiss, ‘The International Exhibition of Photography in Brussels’, Close Up, IX:3 (September 1932), 188–9. 21 – See Anonymous, ‘The “Positive Electron”’, The Times (11 March 1933), 12; and Anonymous, ‘Photographs of Atom Tracks’, The Times (20 November 1937), 17. 22 – The most comprehensive guide to the popularisation of science in twentieth-century Britain currently available is: Peter J. Bowler, Science For All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth Century Britain, Chicago and London: University of Chicago 2009. 23 – Susan L. Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists, London: Methuen 1937, ix. 24 – Whitworth, ‘The Clothbound Universe’, 53. Two books, which symbolised the contemporary appetite for accessible introductions to relativity theory, were Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World and James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe, both of which underwent repeated reprints and sold in the tens of thousands. See Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1928; and James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1930. 25 – Whitworth, ‘The Clothbound Universe’, 55. 26 – J. W. N. Sullivan, Athenaeum (13 June 1919), 464. 27 – Advertisement for The Science of Life in The Listener (18 November 1931), 886. 28 – Ibid. 29 – Herbert Read, ‘The Universal Harmony’, The Listener (6 August 1942), 187. Although Read does not mention photomicrography explicitly, it is clear that his example relates to a series of photographs showing the action of a droplet of fluid on a body of liquid in On Growth and Form. See, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, New York: Dover Publications Inc. 1942 (1992 edition), 389–90. 30 – Short ‘factual films’ began largely as poor-quality ‘fillers’ for main cinematic features, although by the early 1930s this position had begun to change, as film-makers such as John Grierson and Paul Rotha saw documentary as a potential source of educational outreach and genuine socio-economic change. See Rachael Low, Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s, London: George Allen & Unwin 1979, 2–4. 31 – See Rachael Low, The History of British Film, 1918–1929, London: George Allen & Unwin 1971, 286. 32 – See Percy Smith and Mary Field, Secrets of Nature, London: Faber 1934. 33 – See Timothy Boon, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television, London: Wallflower Press 2008, 85–7. G-B.I. was the successor company to British Instructional. 34 – Indeed The Film in National Life noted that: ‘Accelerated photography (very slow mechanical exposure) has given a new significance to the gradual processes of plant growth and decay. Micro-cinematography joins the perception of the microscope to that of the film camera’; see The Film in National Life, Report on the Commission of Educational and Cultural Films, London: George Allen and Unwin 1932, 122. See also Low, The History of British Film, 286–7. 35 – Low, Documentary and Educational Films, 3. 36 – See Gary Werskey, The Visible College, London: Free Association Books 1988. 37 – See The Cinema in Education for a contemporary discussion of the pedagogic utility of micro-cinematographic films as classroom aids: Charles D. Otterly, The Cinema in Education: A Handbook for Teachers, London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd 1935, esp. 5, 19 and 23. 38 – Anonymous, ‘The Film World and Travel Pictures’, The Times (18 December 1929), 12; similar praise for the British Film Institute's science films was given in a review of 1930: Anonymous, ‘The Film World and Travel Pictures’, The Times (22 October 1930), 14. 39 – The Monthly Film Bulletin's Science Committee questioned the inappropriate jollity of the voiceover of Magic Myxies as well as some of its scientific conclusions. See Anonymous, Monthly Film Bulletin, 6:69 (30 September 1939), 196. 40 – See Low, The History of British Film, 130. 41 – Anonymous, ‘The Progress of Science: Films of Living Cells’, The Times (6 July 1931), 19. 42 – John Grierson, ‘The New Generation in Sculpture’, Apollo,12, (November 1930), 350. 43 – Close-Up viewed itself as channel for experimental ‘modernist’ criticism, its writers being, ‘determined to transform the cultural topography of cinema and its future’; see Anne Friedberg, ‘Reading Close-Up, 1927–1933’, in Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell 1998, 3. For an overview of Close-Up's influence and cultural strategy, see Friedberg, 1–26. 44 – Oswell Blakeston, ‘Personally About Percy Smith’, Close Up, VIII:2 (June 1931), 143–6. 45 – It is also worth noting here the possible influence of the American pioneer of time-lapse photography, John Ott, who worked extensively on photo-microscopy in the interwar period and lectured widely, including in Britain. 46 – T. Weiss, ‘Film Review: Das Keimende Leben’, Close Up, IX:3 (September 1932), 208. 47 – For an overview of this topic, see: Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, London: Allen Lane 2009, 93–135. 48 – Anonymous, Monthly Film Bulletin, 6 (1939), 28 cited in Boon, Films of Fact, 87. 49 – See Nigel Vaux Halliday, More than a Bookshop: Zwemmer's and Art in the 20th Century, London: Philip Wilson Publishers 1991, 75–6. 50 – See Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in Nature, London: Zwemmer 1929. 51 – Frederick Etchells, ‘Nature and Art’, The Architectural Review (December 1929), 299. 52 – Anonymous, ‘What Nature Knows of Art’, The Listener, II:36 (18 September 1929), 370. 53 – Anonymous, ‘Book Reviews – New Books’, Close Up, IX:3 (September 1932), 208. 54 – Anonymous, ‘What Nature Knows of Art’, 370. 55 – See Michèle Lavallée, ‘Art Nouveau’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner, London: Macmillan 1996, 562. 56 – Ulrike Meyer Stump, ‘Karl Blossfeldt's Working Collages – A Photographic Sketchbook’, in Karl Blossfeldt: Working Collages, Cambridge and London: MIT 2001, 7. 57 – See Mundy, ‘Form and Creation’, 17. 58 – Joseph Albers, ‘Concerning Fundamental Design’, in Bauhaus, 1919–1928, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd 1939, 120. 59 – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, London: Faber 1934 (unpaginated). 60 – Anonymous, ‘What Nature Knows of Art’, 370. 61 – Paul Nash, ‘Photography and Modern Art’, The Listener (27 July 1932), 130. 62 – Ibid. 63 – Anonymous, ‘Art Forms in Nature’, The Times (5 October 1929), 13. 64 – Karl Nierendorf, ‘Preface to Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen Der Kunst (1928)’, in Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, London: Arts Council 1978, 18. 65 – As discussed by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London: Routledge 2002, 136–77. 66 – The plates from Linnaeus's book were copied or adapted in almost every single botanical textbook of the Enlightenment era, and provided a visual taxonomy shared by botanists throughout Europe. As such, the visual correspondence between Blossfeldt's photographs and Linnaeus's plates suggest something more than pure coincidence and points towards a deeply ingrained method of classifying the plant world. See: Daniela Bleichmar, ‘Training the Naturalist's Eye in the Eighteenth Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local Blind Spots’, in Visualizing the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Andrew Graciano, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008, 6. 67 – See W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope, London: The Studio 1935; and W. A. Bentley and W. J. Humphreys, Snow Crystals, New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1931. 68 – Halliday, More than a Bookshop, 75–6. 69 –Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope, text for Plate 7 (image reproduced as figure 5). 70 – See John Piper, Untitled review of World Beneath the Microscope, Axis, 4 (1935), 28. This was a review of Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope. 71 – Anonymous, ‘Art and Nature’, 871. 72 – Whitworth, ‘The Clothbound Universe’, 74–5. 73 – Gerald Heard, ‘New Worlds in Science: The Layman at the Crossroads’, Sunday Times (31 March 1935), 8. 74 – Much later Zwemmer would issue a third edition of Art Forms in Nature in 1967. 75 – See David Mellor, ‘London–Berlin–London: A Cultural History. The Reception and Influence of the New German Photography in Britain 1927–33’, in Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, 113–29. 76 – On this subject, see: Peder Anker, ‘The Bauhaus of Nature’, MODERNISM/modernity, 12:2 (2005), 229–51. 77 – Low, Documentary and Educational Films, 29; and Overy, The Morbid Age, 130–5. 78 – Low, Documentary and Educational Films, 68–9 and 156–70. 79 – See Isabelle Moffat, ‘“A Horror of Abstract Thought”: Postwar Britain and Hamilton's 1951 “Growth and Form” Exhibition’, October, 94 (Autumn 2000), 89–112

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