| | | | Leendert Blok: Silent BeautiesColor Photographs from the 1920sText by Gilles Clément.
 Leendert Blok experimented with color photography and the use of the panoramic format. In the 1920s, the Dutch photographer worked in close collaboration with flower producers, providing color prints and autochromes for the display catalogues of the various species they cultivated. Blok portrayed flowers as objects of desire, using the Autochrome Lumière technique.
For Blok, photography related above all to the gaze. Muted tones and soft bronze hues reveal a timeless world of flora, in which corolla, petals and buds are sublimated by chiaroscuro. The flowers stand out against a plain dark background, alluding to the famous vanitas genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Tulips, dahlias, daffodils, irises, hyacinths and peonies reveal themselves in all their glorious diversity. Blok's photographs are reminiscent of botanists' slides of yore, immersing us in the immanence of plant life, in which each flower becomes a sculpture.
Leendert Blok (1895-1986) was born in Holland and studied journalism in South Africa before returning to Lisse, near Amsterdam, where he established his Photo Technischbureau company, for which he procured work from nearby horticulturalists, producing their display catalogues while experimenting with panoramic formats and color photography. From 1925, when the use of color photography was relatively rare, he began using the autochrome technique, which involved making composite images from three-color separations on glass plates with potato starches. The resulting images could not be duplicated.
"IRIS, Ismene, Uma" is reproduced from Leendert Blok: Silent Beauties. |
|  | STATUS: Out of stock Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory. | |
| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/29/2018 Produced via the Autochrome Lumière technique in the 1920s, Leendert Blok's gorgeous, sultry, early-color photographs for Dutch botanical catalogues are just about as sexy as it gets without tipping into O'Keeffe/Mapplethorpe territory. Each print is a composite of three-color separations on a glass plate—therefore unique and impossible to reproduce. If you're looking for the perfect gift for Mother's Day, we can't recommend this book highly enough. Beautiful paper and binding, exquisite reproductions, and the singularity of the material itself make for a sensual, fascinating gift. continue to blog | FORTHCOMING AND RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS |  | FRAENKEL GALLERYISBN: 9781881337232
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