Karl Blossfeldt was an attentive observers of nature, a teacher of contemplation. He used photography in the early days but his images are still powerful today. It reminds us to look at the ordinary and realize the immanent wonder.
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."
Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.
Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule,Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.
The Major, Graf von Farlsberg, the Prussian
commandant, was reading his newspaper, lying back in a great armchair, with his
booted feet on the beautiful marble fire-place, where his spurs had made two
holes, which grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been in
the château of Urville.
A cup of coffee was smoking
on a small, inlaid table, which was stained with liquors, burnt by cigars,
notched by the pen-knife of the victorious officer, who occasionally would stop
while sharpening a pencil, to jot down figures, or to make a drawing on it,
just as it took his fancy.
The game should be governed in a way that makes all football lovers proud
David Conn
Saturday 30 May 2015
T
he former Argentine footballer Jorge Valdano once wrote that the journey of every adult football lover begins with a child, kicking a ball to the park. For some of those involved at the highest ranks of Fifa, their journey from the park ended this week in dawn arrests or guilty pleas to alleged corruption beyond a child’s imagination. One ineradicable image conjured by the US criminal indictment is the allegation that the Fifa executive committee member Jeffrey Webb had a $3m bribe partly routed to the man who was building him a swimming pool. The 164-page indictment of 14 defendants indeed left one almost drowning in detail, but still the anger and disgust came through. I fell in love with football as a boy in the parks, playgrounds and in the very air of Manchester, and I still believe – more than ever – in its beauty as a sport and the essential effort, spirit and team ethos it requires. Yet the game is subject to relentless exploitation by people entrusted to be its custodians, what the Swiss attorney general, referring to allegations regarding Fifa’s award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, described this week as “unjust enrichment”. Yet unjust enrichment is not restricted to the bribes or kickbacks that fall under the strict definition of corruption. Would it have been more admirable had Webb, if this bribe is proven, taken a grossly inflated fee from a TV rights contract by being on the payroll legitimately? Many whose enrichment has outraged football lovers have made millions by selling shares in football companies that supporters still quaintly refer to as clubs. The guiding light for running football should be as simple as the game’s essence. Picture the young boy, running to the park with his ball, and nurture a sport fit for his lifelong loyalty.
• David Conn’s books about football include The Beautiful Game? and Richer than God.
Nancy Tucker with her mother, Jessica. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Nancy Tucker
How I got back from anorexia
At 15, Nancy Tucker went to her GP about her problems with food. She felt fobbed off and spiralled out of control – she and her mother talk about why turning to the medical profession was a disaster
Joanna Moorhead Sat 30 May 2015 06.45 BST
W
hen Nancy Tucker was 15, her mother, Jessica realised that she had a problem with food. Nancy had gone on a diet, but the diet seemed to be going on and on, she seemed more and more obsessed with what was on her plate, and she was behaving strangely at mealtimes.
Jessica persuaded Nancy to visit their GP, but the GP’s reaction was unexpected. She weighed Nancy, consulted lots of charts, and then said she didn’t meet the criteria for referral. Her weight wasn’t “low enough”, it seemed, to trigger help.
Three years later, Nancy was as dangerously ill with anorexia as it is possible to be. Twice she had to be hospitalised: Jessica remembers phoning the ward in the middle of the night to check whether her daughter was still alive. Could things have been different if the GP had heeded Jessica’s initial flag-waving? It is impossible to know, but what is clear, talking to the two of them, is that what should have been “help” on the part of medics and therapists was often more of a hindrance. “When the GP told me I wasn’t bad enough to merit referral, what that said to me was: go away and lose more weight,” says Nancy.
Then there was the fact that, once Nancy was diagnosed and referred to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), Jessica felt undermined and unsupported. “I felt blamed, disapproved of, traumatised. One therapist in particular was very suspicious of our relationship – she felt we were unhealthily close, and that I was colluding in Nancy’s illness.” Looking back, Jessica feels she was simply struggling with an incredibly difficult situation, with her daughter wasting away in front of her and a younger child to look after as well. The attitude of the therapists became one more burden.
Now Nancy is 21, and in a very different place. When doctor after doctor, therapist after therapist and hospital visit after hospital visit failed to make things any better, at least in the longer term, Jessica made the drastic decision to give up her job and to take Nancy out of the pressurised atmosphere of the independent girls’ school she attended: like CAMHS, she felt it was problematic rather than helpful. It was Nancy’s GCSE year: she continued to study, but she did it with guidance from tutors, and from home. “People around us were very disapproving,” says Jessica. Nancy agrees: “I think they thought that if I was allowed to retreat from the world, I’d never want to go back there.”
But Jessica had a strong instinct that this was the right way forward, and Nancy says now that, although her year cocooned at home with her mother wasn’t the end of her anorexia, it was a step on the road to recovery. “It got me to a place where I was living a life again, and that allowed me to move forward,” she says.
Nancy did well in her GCSEs, and went to a different school to do A-levels. Then, at the age of 19, she decided to write down the story of her illness. Strangely enough she had written to children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, of whom she is a big fan, a few years earlier, when she was in the throes of the worst stage of her illness, suggesting Wilson should tackle the subject in one of her books. “She wrote back straight away, and she said she had thought about it but she was worried about the sensitivities. But she said maybe I should be the person writing the book. And I suddenly realised it was something I had to do, and once I’d decided to do it, the story just rushed out of me.
Nancy Tucker as a small child. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
“I wrote it in three days and three nights – I hardly slept. I just wrote it all down. I wrote it in a purging sort of way: it was as though I had this story inside me and I simply had to get it out.”
The story was never intended for publication, but then Nancy heard from a friend she hadn’t spoken to for a while and decided to send her what she had written as a way of explaining what she’d been through. That friend sent it to another friend, whose mother was a writer: when she read it, she sent it to her agent, who is now Nancy’s agent, and this month the story arrived in bookshops as The Time in Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope. Wilson, who gave her that initial prompt to write it, has said it “isn’t just another anorexia misery memoir – it’s a work of literature”.
It is easy to see why that writer mother sent Nancy’s story to her agent: the book is stylish and incisive, and she weaves her tale of fear and food, confusion and calories grippingly and with skill. At one point she provides the kind of description of how anorexia feels that could only have come from the vortex of the condition itself. “I am too big and too small and too much and not enough and too frightened to change and too sad to stay the same,” she writes. “I am an addict and a slave to the beauty myth and I diet and regress and reject and control and cry for help and I still can’t stop the ring-ring-ringing in my ears telling me that something bad is coming, something bad is coming RIGHT NOW. I want to shine and I want to be invisible and I want to be myself and I want to be anyone else in the world and in the end I think the only solution is to get smaller and smaller and smaller and then one day to disappear.”
For all its writerly skill, The Time in Between makes uncomfortable reading and not only because it describes such a complex and disturbing medical condition. The other disquieting element is how frank Nancy is about her family relationships, and especially what she feels about her father, David.
He is described, at times, as distant and critical and not as involved in her life as her friends’ fathers are. Some of the best parts of the book are written script-style, like scenes from a movie or a documentary, with camera directions (“Stay with Nancy’s face. She blinks heavily; she looks very tired”); and when Jessica reveals that her father directs TV dramas you can’t help feeling that what Nancy really wants is to please her dad.
Can it be that simple? Apparently, he criticised the book when he first read it, though he has since read it again and declared it extremely well written.
Jessica, it turns out, has not read the book. “I’m a bit scared of reading it. I lived it, and I don’t want to go back to those times,” she says.
Nancy, meanwhile, says that while she would not say writing the book was the key to her recovery, getting her story out was a catharsis that helped her begin to move on. She’s still “not normal around food”, she says, but she’s a great deal better than she was and hopeful of making a complete recovery one day. This autumn, having twice deferred it, she is taking up a place to study at Oxford University.
“Sometimes I think, what on earth am I doing, going somewhere so pressurised and competitive after everything I’ve been through,” admits Nancy. “But I really don’t think I’m doing it because I want to be an academic star. What I want to do is study psychology; and what my illness has done is made me realise that life isn’t all about getting top marks in exams, it’s about working out who you are and what you want to do with your life.”
Irecalled
this horrible story, the events of which occurred long ago, and this horrible
woman, the other day at a fashionable seaside resort, where I saw on the beach
a well-known young, elegant and charming Parisienne, adored and respected by
everyone.
Ihad been invited by a friend to pay him a
visit in a little provincial town. He took me about in all directions to do the
honors of the place, showed me noted scenes, chateaux, industries, ruins. He
pointed out monuments, churches, old carved doorways, enormous or distorted
trees, the oak of St. Andrew, and the yew tree of Roqueboise.
