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The Key to a Hidden World: Photomicrography andClose-up Nature Photography in Interwar BritainEdward JulerPublished online: 15 Feb 2012.

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The Key to a Hidden World:Photomicrography and Close-upNature Photography in Interwar

Britain

Edward Juler

Upon its publication in Britain, Karl Blossfeldt’s photo-album, Art Forms inNature, was something of a publishing phenomenon, striking a chord with thegeneral public and going through no fewer than three print-runs between 1929and 1935. Featuring a suite of magnified photographs of flower heads, seedsand plant tendrils, the book’s success powerfully represented the current ofinterest in close-up nature photography contemporaneously experienced inBritain. Indeed, between 1929 and 1939 a wide range of publications werereleased to popular acclaim that included lavish albumen or silver-gelatinprints of microscopic forms newly disclosed to the human eye through photo-micrographic technology. At the same time, the embryonic documentarycinema movement capitalised upon public enthusiasm for scientific discoveryby releasing a range of natural history films that made use of pioneeringmicro-cinematographic techniques. While the pan-European stimulus ofphotomicrography on avant-garde activity during the 1930s has been welldocumented by art historians, little work has been carried out on the socialreception of photomicrography or on the specific cultural conditions underwhich close-up natural imagery was consumed in Britain. Framed around theunrivalled critical success of Blossfeldt’s publication, this article will thusinvestigate the popularity of photomicrography and close-up nature photogra-phy in Britain between the world wars by analysing their promotion andreception.

Keywords: close-up, photomicrography, nature, natural history, documentary cinema,

popular science, Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), microscopy, technology, Britain

New techniques of visualising the natural world, perfected in the years between the

wars and announced to great acclaim by the popular press, generated a significant

current of interest on the part of the British public in photographic images of nature

seen close-up, especially between the years 1929 and 1939.1 Technologies such as X-ray

crystallography, ultraviolet microscopy and, by 1931, electron microscopy not only

transformed scientific understandings of nature but also – through photographs and

films – influenced public responses to the new conceptions of matter emerging from

the life sciences by revealing a hitherto unseen world of greatly magnified cellular

structures andmicroorganisms. Even if microscopic imagery had been first brought to

the public eye in 1665 by Robert Hooke’s tome,Micrographia,2 the upsurge in popular

science literature witnessed during the early twentieth century meant that photomi-

crography was increasingly bound into broader public debates about the role of

I would like to acknowledge the generous

support of the Henry Moore Foundation

during the preparation of this article. I would

also like to thank Ann and Jurgen Wilde of

the Karl Blossfeldt Archive for granting

permission to reproduce the images by Karl

Blossfeldt.

Email for correspondence: edjuler@hotmail.

com

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.

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biology in everyday life – a discourse that, routinely, merged together both pedagogic

and entertainment values.3 At the dawn of the twentieth century, the evolutionary

zoologist Ernst Haeckel had laid the foundations of this dichotomy by producing a

collection of exquisite drawings of marine protozoa and plant life (published as

Kunstformen der Natur in 1904) that made public, in photorealistic detail, a previously

undiscovered universe of microscopic creatures. By wedding a meticulous system of

scientific classification to a highly wrought form of visual design, Kunstformen der

Natur set the standard for what would become the publishing industry’s later attempt

to marry the educational with the aesthetic in tomes of close-up nature photography.4

The promotion of photomicrography was further aided by a new generation of

European photographers who heralded modern scientific photography as signalling

a new age of objectivity that undermined Pictorialist ‘art’ photography precisely

through offering up a vision of reality undistorted by the human gaze.5 Although

the pan-European stimulus of photomicrography on avant-garde activity during the

1930s has been convincingly mapped-out by art historians,6 little work has been done

on the social reception of photomicrography or on the specific cultural conditions

under which photomicrographic imagery was consumed in Britain. Framed around

the unparalleled success of Karl Blossfeldt’s 1929 tome,Art Forms in Nature, this article

will thus explore the popularity of photomicrography and close-up nature photo-

graphy in Britain between the world wars by analysing their promotion and reception.

‘New Light on the Infinitesimal’: Journalistic Coverage of Photomicrographic

Technology

A 1929 review in the Times Literary Supplement of Blossfeldt’s photo-book of plant

forms – published in Britain as Art Forms in Nature – noted the ‘extraordinary appeal

of the 120 plates’, which featured a variety of flowers, seeds, leaves and tendrils

magnified, on average, between three and fifteen times (figure 1).7 Yet the Times

Literary Supplement review neglected to mention any tangible reasons for the strength

of Blossfeldt’s appeal (the publication would go through three print-runs between

1929 and 1935 in Britain) beyond a vague allusion to a contemporary interest in

observing the action of physical forces on plants. In actual fact, the wide-reaching

impact of Art Forms in Nature owed much to the phenomenon of the interwar boom

in popular-science literature books, which included not only texts related to the

explosion of interest in physics sparked off by new developments in the theory of

the atom,8 but also publications on the subject of biology that were sustained by fresh

discoveries in the nascent fields of embryology, genetics and biochemistry. New

findings in biology were commonly reported on by newspapers and weekly journals,

and as novel methods of recording the inner workings of the natural world permitted

the visualisation of such findings, journalistic reports typically stressed the role of X-

ray or microscopic technology in bringing forth innovative and exciting concepts in

biology. From its inception, photomicrography had been closely connected to biology

by allowing for the spread of scientific knowledge without recourse to either expensive

illustrations or the cumbersome mounting and preservation of specimens.9 That

photomicrography provided both an image of nature otherwise imperceptible to the

human eye as well as an apparently ‘perfect and unerring record’ made it particularly

apposite to the scientific study of the natural world.10 Indeed, such notions were

integral to interwar responses to photomicrographic technology.

A 1931 article in The Times spoke praisingly of a ‘technique for taking cinema-

tographic films of living cells’ so that the ‘effects of irradiation on cancerous tissues’

could be better investigated. As cell growth was normally too slow for practicable

observation, the text stressed how:

cinematography films opened new possibilities. The time factor can be manipu-lated so that rapid movements can be slowed down, making it possible toanalyse every phase, or slow movements can be compressed so as to transformchanges imperceptible to the eye into a continuous progress.11

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.

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The unveiling of the electron microscope in 1938 occasioned the eye-grabbing

headline, ‘Key To A Hidden World: New Light on the Infinitesimal’, and was

described as giving ‘an infinitely deeper insight into the vast world of micro-

organisms and micro-inorganic matter than has hitherto been considered possi-

ble’.12 By providing a much greater range of magnification, the electron microscope

moved far beyond conventional technology, ‘revealing organisms, such as viruses

and bacterial individualities, which no human eye has ever beheld in the past’.

Indeed, the wizardry of the microscope was seen to lie precisely in its ability to

successfully bring together various schools of optics, most notably ‘ultraviolet rays,

photography and microscopy into collaboration’ so as to be able to view even ‘the

minute particles of colloid chemistry’.13

Alongside such thrilling reviews of the insights gained from these technologies

were a variety of illustrations and photographs: The Times’ report on the electron

microscope included pictures of the machinery as well as an enlarged photograph of

a bacillus (figure 2).14 That said, coverage of photomicrography typically veered

between the edifying potential of the technology and its beguiling aesthetic qualities.

On the one hand, the pedagogic capability of microscopy led educationalists to

promote its usage as nothing short of a teaching revolution.15 Yet on the other,

photography journals striving to move beyond antiquated Pictorialist values

Figure 1. Karl Blossfeldt, Nigella damascene,

silver gelatin print, 1915–25. Reproduced as

Plate 47 in Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in

Nature, 1929;# Karl Blossfeldt Archiv–Ann

und Jurgen Wilde, Zulpich 2010.

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’ byWilliam

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.

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promoted photomicrography as an aesthetic marvel of the scientific age, lauding its

clarity of technique and attention to detail.

Interwar Photo-journals and the Dissemination of the Scientific ‘Close-up’

In the first edition of Modern Photography in 1931, G. H. Saxon Mills spoke of the

‘development, scope and possibilities’ of modern photography, arguing that in

‘scientific observation, by means of x-rays or astronomical research, and in its

amazing development in the cinematic form, its form is as yet hardly explored’.16

Indeed, in stark contrast to the Spartan picture-editing policies of newspapers and

literary reviews, photography journals rapidly became conduits through which

photomicrographic images reached a wider audience, as editors sought to capitalise

upon public curiosity in pictures of the physical world newly seen by science.

Perceived as a symptom of the new photographic age, photomicrography featured

prominently in the pages of photo-journals, and was often singled out by editors as

representative of ‘the various types of photography now practiced’.17 Publications,

such as Photography Yearbook, increasingly had sections devoted to ‘scientific’

photography, in which blown-up photographs of insects, crystals and plant-life

were printed alongside images obtained through radiography, infrared imaging,

telephotography and aerial photography.18

Something of the popularity of microphotography and X-ray photography

amongst amateurs can be gleaned from the regular discussions of cutting-edge

technical innovations – ranging from higher-powered lenses to new emulsion for-

mulas for radiographic material – that took place in Modern Photography.19 At the

same time, journalistic enthrallment to the workings of the physical world as revealed

by science was mirrored in photo-journals’ singling out exhibitions featuring close-

up images of nature as being worthy of especial consideration. For example, when

reviewing the International Photography Exhibition of 1932 for Close Up, Trude

Weiss drew attention to the:

beautiful close ups of flowers and animals [. . .]. Very big enlargements oftissues, the human skin, flowers, never failed to have an amazing effect. [. . .]There were some excellent microphotographs of medical objects, as well asrecords of operations on the eye.20

Such enthusiasm was generated and sustained by newspaper accounts of the new

visualising technologies, in which photography was deemed responsible for revealing

the hitherto invisible make-up of nature: knowledge of the atomic composition of

matter typically being communicated through reference to photographs of atom

tracks produced in cloud chambers.21

Figure 2. Illustration of the ‘Super-

Microscope’ and a photomicrograph of bacilli

obtained by this apparatus, printed in The

Times (26 November 1938), 16. Permission

sought.

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.

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The Role of Popular Science in Promoting Photomicrography and Close-up Photography

The promotion of photomicrography operated in tandem with a wider public

enthusiasm for popular scientific literature.22 In the introduction to her book

Philosophy and the Physicists of 1937, Susan Stebbing identified her target audience

as ‘that section of the reading public who buy in large quantities and, no doubt,

devour with great earnestness the popular books written by scientists for their

enlightenment’.23 Sustained by fresh developments in physics, popular science

evolved rapidly as a field, with the publication of numerous articles, books and

pamphlets – a point noted by the journalNature, which observed in 1921 that almost

a thousand papers had been already printed on the subject of the new physics.24 Yet

this phenomenon was not just limited to expositions of physics as biology was also

rendered into more user-friendly formats for general consumption. The Science of

Life by H. G. Wells, G. P. Wells and Julian Huxley straightforwardly conveyed

cutting-edge biological issues and went through several editions between 1929 and

1938. Julian Huxley’s seminal Essays of A Biologist was reprinted six times between

1923 and 1939, while Lancelot Hogben’s Science for the Citizen – which discussed the

life sciences extensively – was reprinted four times between 1938 and 1943.

To describe the popularity of biology during the years between the wars raises

the question as to why science became subject to such high levels of public interest in

the first place. On the one hand, as MichaelWhitworth has shown, there was genuine

public excitement at the revolutionary discoveries of modern science, at ‘the inves-

tigations into the fundamental units of matter, and by descriptions of vast interstellar

distances’.25 This interest was compounded by the tendency of critics to lump

together the narratives of science and literature into one common discourse. The

science writer, J. W. N. Sullivan, for instance, noted that editions of popular-

scientific books such as the Home University Library would become serious rivals

to modern novels and poetry as they were ‘more dramatic, [opened] up larger vistas,

[and were] as well written, and [. . .] cheaper’.26 This co-option of territory pre-

viously occupied by literature into the compass of science was facilitated by the

sensationalist manner in which popular science was advertised. The Science of Life,

for example, was billed as being ‘more thrilling than any short-lived play at the

theatre or cinema’ and ‘stranger than any flights of fiction fancy’. Eye-catching,

close-up images of snails mating and a human skull were employed in advertising

campaigns as a means of heightening the publication’s appeal to inquisitive readers.

Through perusal of the text, the reader was enjoined to realise their ‘part as an actor

in [the] gargantuan epic drama of Life’27 – strategically providing the popular science

reader with an active role as opposed to the passive one adopted in fiction reading,

and so increasing the dramatic pull of the publication.

Close-up photography was increasingly employed as an attention-grabbing tool

through which public interest in the natural world could be marshalled and main-

tained. The advertising campaign for The Science of Life took pains to stress the

‘extraordinary’ nature of the close-up illustrations, making use of photomicrographs

in promotional material to explain how ‘the 1000 ‘‘New’’ Pictures that illustrate ‘‘The

Science of Life [make] meanings Graphically clear’’.28 And in certain cases photo-

micrography served to make otherwise demanding scientific texts more accessible to

lay-audiences. A 1942 review by Herbert Read of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s

canonical work on morphology – On Growth and Form – recommended the text ‘to

the general reader’ by claiming the significance ‘which [the] science of form has for

the theory of art’ precisely through reference to a suite of photomicrographs printed

in the book illustrating the viscosity of fluids.29

The Documentary CinemaMovement and the Popularisation of Micro-cinematography

Another agent responsible for disseminating images of photomicrography to the

public was the cinema. The emergence of the documentary cinema movement in the

1930s had reinvigorated an industry that, in Britain at least, had been typically

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 ClothboundUniverse’,

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,

TheNature of the PhysicalWorld, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1928; and James

Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1930.

25 –Whitworth, ‘The ClothboundUniverse’,

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.

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limited by a lack of investment and a commitment to ‘theatrical’ productions.30

Although scientists such as John Russell Reynolds had begun making films to aid

clinical diagnosis and by 1921 Kodak had begun collecting a library of medical films,

the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films commented in a 1932 report,

The Film in National Life, that Britain had largely failed to make much use of film for

scientific recording and research.31 An early exception to this rule had been the

Secrets of Nature series, which had been produced by the company British

Instructional: an organisation that made a number of high-quality documentaries

at this time for general release in cinemas. By the end of 1929 almost a hundred such

films had been shown to popular acclaim. An influential contributor was Percy

Smith, who had experimented with making time-lapse films of plant life, which

could then speed-up the process of growth by up to ninety-six thousand times.32 The

series continued into the 1930s and Gaumont-British Instructional (G-B.I.) was

successful in encouraging the participation of leading biologists in the production

of its nature films: the biologist, Julian Huxley, became biological films advisor to

G-B.I and helped to produce a range of films on nature and heredity.33

On the one hand, micro-cinematographic films of nature were seen to possess

an entertainment value, which was reflected in their popular success at the box-

office. Yet on the other, the films were acknowledged as being valuable to science

through faithfully recording the processes of nature.34 Because of this natural

history features were seen as effective educational aids and used interchangeably

as both classroom tools and as crowd-pleasers in the cinemas.35 Part of this belief in

the pedagogic value of documentary and natural history film was due to a firm

cultural conviction in the perceived social value of science.36 Yet pedagogues

naively felt that, as an ‘impartial’ record, film provided an engaging and informa-

tive supplement to the routine of classroom teaching by animating the subject and

allowing it to be viewed ‘naturally’ within its own environment.37 As early as 1929,

a review in The Times remarked upon the growth in number and quality of

educational films in Britain and noted that the catalogue of British Instructional

Films made ‘interesting reading’ by detailing documentary films ‘showing the

habits of birds, the lives of insects [and] the growth of flowers’ – the botanical

films were deemed especially praiseworthy in their detail and focus: ‘The Romance

of Flowers show[ing] the way in which flowers distribute their pollen and in Plant

Magic the audience can see how the elements gathered through the roots and cells

of the plants are turned into grape sugar’.38

The long-running and commercially successful Secrets of Nature series was a

major conduit through which micro-cinematography was broadcast to a wider

audience. Although the Secrets of Nature range encompassed a wide variety of natural

history subjects, including films about animals at the zoo, bird habits and meteor-

ology (to name but a few), a large minority of ‘shorts’ were micro-cinematographic

films dealing with subjects such as pond-life, germination and insect life. An

Aquarium in a Wineglass (1926), for example, showed in microscopic detail how a

countless and diverse number of infusoria spawned from the placing of a piece of hay

in a wineglass. Likewise,Magic Myxies of 1931, showed the lifecycle of a slime fungus

in close-up, speeded-up to take place within a ten-minute timespan. While there was

occasionally some criticism of the veracity of the commentary,39 in general Secrets of

Nature was well received.40 A Times article of 1931 spoke of the popularity of these

‘nature’ pictures in the course of explaining the significance of making films of ‘living

cells’ for medical research.41 And in a perspicacious essay discussing the ‘organic’

qualities of contemporary sculpture, John Grierson considered the wider impact of

such films on the public psyche:

I am apt to think that the cinema has done something to open our eyes [toorganic life] in this respect, with its power of revealing the constructions ofplant life, animal life, and all life together in motion. It would still be moreaccurate to say that biology is getting into our blood.42

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,TheHistory 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.

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Something of the groundbreaking character of the cinematography employed by

the Secrets of Nature production crew can be gauged from the fact that the experi-

mental film journal, Close Up,43 published a 1931 article entitled ‘Personally About

Percy Smith’ in which the techniques and philosophy of the Secrets of Nature team

were expounded on.44 Smith had been an early experimenter in micro-

cinematography and, in collaboration with Mary Field, had been responsible for

many of the triumphs of Secrets of Nature.45 In fact, Close Up regularly promoted

micro-cinematography within its pages: the silent-documentary film, Germinating

Life, which provided a cinematic account of pre-natal human development, was

praised by the journal for its ‘very fine shots on blood-circulation’ and for its being

‘absolutely serious and, unlike so many [other] popular scientific films, free from

romance and mysticism’.46

Beyond the merits of the cinematography, another reason why such films

garnered public interest was undoubtedly the politicisation of biology that occurred

during the 1930s through the agency of the British Eugenics Society.47 A 1938

propaganda film produced by G-B.I. for the Eugenics Society entitled From

Generation to Generation incorporated micro-cinematography to demonstrate the

physiology of reproduction – the film going on to explain the workings of Mendelian

genetics; interspersing images of ‘pedigree’ human beings with sequences of ‘defec-

tives’, with Huxley – a prominent eugenicist – providing the commentary, conclud-

ing that, ‘If we are to maintain the race at a high level mentally and physically,

everybody sound in body and mind should marry and have enough children to

perpetuate their stock and carry on the race’.48 Coupled with the success of natural

history films at the box-office, such politicised debates amplified the cultural sig-

nificance of micro-cinematography and helped to foster a sympathetic environment

in which books of close-up nature photography could commercially thrive.

Art Forms in Nature and the Photomicrographic ‘Art Book’

Upon its publication, Karl Blossfeldt’s photo-album, Art Forms in Nature (originally

published in Germany by Wasmuth of Berlin under the title Urformen der Kunst in

1928), 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 1935.49

Subtitled, Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature, the book

(and its re-editions) featured a suite of large (320 mm · 250 mm), full-page, black-

and-white plates of photographs of ‘plant forms’ (typically, flower-heads, stems,

leaves, burrs and tendrils) magnified, on average, between three and fifteen times

(figure 3).50 The response to Blossfeldt’s photo-book was unprecedented: an editor-

ial in The Times, three pages of coverage in the Illustrated London News, substantial

reviews in major publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener

and The Architectural Review (not to mention smaller newspapers such as the

Manchester Guardian), and even a lengthy analysis of the significance of the photo-

graphs in R. H. Wilenski’s treatise The Meaning of Modern Sculpture (1932). The

Architectural Review described it as an ‘enchanting collection of plates [that] gives us

a rich compendium of ‘‘Historic Ornament’’ from a new angle’,51 whilst the Listener

called it ‘a book to pour over’, the photographs inspiring ‘not only admiration from

the nature-lovers, but also study from many an artist’.52 Similarly, the 1932

co-edition elicited comparably enthusiastic praise from pundits: Close up described

it as ‘a superb affair. Better than the first, for the photos are more spread in their

jewelry’.53

Critics habitually interpreted Blossfeldt’s photographs as invaluable blueprints

for design: The Listener entreating that ‘Art Forms in Nature should find its way into

the reference library of every art-school worthy of the name’.54 In this respect, the

reception of Blossfeldt recapitulated a long-standing aesthetic discourse, stretching

back to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement that encouraged artists to

study nature as a means of bypassing Classical and Renaissance precedent and

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.

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academic tradition.55 Commentators frequently stressed the stylistic closeness of

Blossfeldt’s plant-forms to embroidery and ironwork, and how they positively

contributed to design theory. The pedagogic utility of Art Forms in Nature partly

stemmed from Blossfeldt’s practice, the original aim of which was didactic in

providing photographs as blueprints for his students’ plant-modelling workshops.56

Yet it also had an important antecedent in Haeckel’s decorative anthology of organ-

isms that, a quarter of a century earlier, had acted as a design sourcebook for the Art

Nouveaumovement57 – a point not lost on Blossfeldt’s London publisher, who used

a direct translation of Haeckel’s title for the English edition of Urformen der Kunst.

Art Forms in Nature formed part of a raft of books produced mainly by Bauhaus

faculty members that were published in Britain throughout the 1930s. Many of these

texts (such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision: From Material to Architecture,

New York 1930) were intended as educational aids and often included photomicro-

graphs amongst their illustrations. Generally, these publications dealt with aspects of

the contemporary form-function debate by laying emphasis upon the acquisition of

a knowledge of materials in order to implement more successful design techniques.

As a result, characteristically scientistic values often found expression in Bauhaus

texts that sought to nurture an empirical attitude so as to develop an all-round

Figure 3. Karl Blossfeldt, Phacelia Congesta,

silver gelatin print, 1915–25. Reproduced as

Plate 28 in Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in

Nature, 1929;# Karl Blossfeldt Archiv–Ann

und Jurgen Wilde, Zulpich 2010.

55 – See Michele Lavalle�e, ‘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.

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aesthetic sensibility in students. Joseph Albers’s plea that ‘through the study of the

problems of materials, we acquire exact observation and new vision’ relied upon

focusing student concerns onto the structural characteristics of physical objects.58

Photomicrography was promoted as an indispensable tool in this respect as it

enabled students to witness the smallest units of creation. Moholy-Nagy spoke of

the ‘microscope andmicrophotography disclos[ing] a new world. They reveal, in this

age of haste and superficiality, the marvel of the smallest units of construction’.59 For

Moholy-Nagy, photomicrography afforded students an accessible and effective

opening into ‘a new education in materials’.

The acuity of vision proffered by Art Forms in Nature appeared, to many,

symptomatic of the range of sight opened up by the new visualising technologies

of the interwar years that had been announced to considerable fanfare by the press.

Reviewers emphasised how the photographs were dependent upon new technology,

and in being so ‘produce[d] an amazing sensation of looking into a new world,

curiously familiar, yet remote from human handiwork’.60 Likewise, the artist-critic

Paul Nash claimed that Art Forms in Nature was ‘an intensely interesting example of

the peculiar power of the camera to discover formal beauty which ordinarily is

hidden from the human eye’.61 For Nash, the very significance of the photographs

lay in the technology itself, without which mankind would have remained forever

ignorant of the underlying intricacy of the plant world:

For it is the camera eye directed by acute human perception which is responsiblefor these remarkable observations. Actually these important forms do not existfor our vision except by virtue of a mechanical scientific process.62

In a somewhat pantheistic eulogy that re-rehearsed some of the metaphysical ques-

tions raised by popular accounts of the new physics, The Times concluded – in light

of Art Forms in Nature – that:

The bright star may have been proved not to be steadfast after all; the flower inthe crannied wall may be on the point of yielding up its last secret; and, afterneighbouring the invisible so close for centuries, man may see the spirits leapfrom trees and flowers only to find them very different fromwhat he expected.63

Readings of this sort were encouraged by Karl Nierendorf’s introduction to the

photographs, which spoke of a growing awareness of nature brought about through

sport, the new architecture and:

film, [which] thanks to the time-lapse cine-camera, [allows humankind to]watch the swelling and shrinking, the breathing and the growth of plants. Themicroscope reveals whole systems of life in drops of water, and the instrumentsof the observatory open up the infinity of the universe.64

The pseudo-scientific qualities of Blossfeldt’s images were heightened by the book’s

subtitle – Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature, which

stressed an empirical agenda – and by the fact that – through carefully selecting and

enlarging various morphological details so as to create a typology of plant forms –

Blossfeldt’s photographic practice outwardly linked up to Enlightenment classifica-

tory systems.65 There is a strong iconographic resemblance, for example, between

Blossfeldt’s work and the visual glossary presented in Carolus von Linnaeus’s

Philosophia botanica of 1751 in which the eleven plates collectively provide a typology

of all the structural variations of each part of the plant.66

Between 1929 and 1935 a spate of art books on the subject of photomicrography

were issued as publishers sought to capitalise upon popular interest in the natural

world seen in close-up. Two notable publications, in this respect, wereWorld Beneath

the Microscope (1935) and Snow Crystals (1931). Both publications adopted a similar

format to Blossfeldt (albumen or silver gelatin prints of magnified natural forms on

high-quality, glossy and largish [250 mm · 180mm] paper) even if the subject matter

ultimately varied (focusing onmicro-organisms and enlarged snowflakes, respectively)

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’, inVisualizing

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.

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(see figures 4–6).67 Ranging from the averagely priced (starting at 5s. forWorld Beneath

the Microscope) to the relatively expensive (£2.2s. for Art Forms in Nature), the

publishing of these photo-albums suggested the willingness of publishers to gamble

on photomicrography’s growing appeal to the public – the publisher, Zwemmer,

putting much time and effort into publishing and promoting the English co-edition

of Art Forms in Nature by liaising with the book’s German publisher as well as

cultivating contacts at newspapers in the run-up to its release.68

Like Art Forms in Nature,World Beneath the Microscope and Snow Crystals were

curious hybrids – superficially ‘art’ books targeted at amateurs and yet simulta-

neously books of ‘science’ that aimed at wowing readers with new microscopic

discoveries. World Beneath the Microscope, for instance, included an introduction

by W. Gaunt that stressed the utility of photomicrography to art and design along-

side a highly technical essay by W. Watson-Baker detailing the practical aspects of

photomicrography. Throughout, the captions that accompanied the photographs

hinted at aesthetic parallels between the products of nature (as visualised by science)

and the works of the artist: an image of some ‘Sponge Spicules’ included the

exhortation that ‘[the] lavish invention of nature is manifest in a granule of sponge.

Has the abstract painter of today achieved anything more interesting than this

evolutionary design?’69 This epistemological ambiguity led to some criticism over

the ‘pompous’ analogies made by publishers between close-up photography and

modern art,70 yet, at the same time, reviewers frequently voiced frustration at the

publications not appearing ‘scientific’ enough – the Times Literary Supplement

bemoaning that ‘though the wish to keep the plates free from typography is under-

standable, it would have been a help to appreciation if the subject and degree of

magnification had been printed below them’.71 Overall, however, reviewers saw no

inherent contradiction in extolling the aesthetic virtues of these ‘art-house’ publica-

tions whilst simultaneously marvelling at their reputed scientific insights.

Conclusions

The Golden Age of photomicrography began to tarnish by the mid-1930s, in con-

junction with a marked decline in public enthusiasm for the genre of popular

scientific literature.72 In 1935 Gerald Heard wondered – in relation to

Figure 4. W. Watson Baker,

Photomicrograph of Vorticella, ca. 1935.

Reproduced as Plate 29 inW.Watson-Baker,

World Beneath the Microscope.

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 ofWorld

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 ClothboundUniverse’,

74–5.

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J. W. N. Sullivan’s book on the life and physical sciences, Science: A New Outline

(1935) – whether ‘such books as these [have] a future – is not the Canon closing?’;73

and the year significantly witnessed the last great boom in photomicrographic ‘art-

books’, seeing both the final re-issuing (with a reduced selection of ninety-six plates)

of Art Forms in Nature and the publication of the inexpensive World Beneath the

Microscope.74 In part, this trend responded to wider changes ongoing in the art

world. Interest in close-up photography had been largely sustained by the labours of

the New Objectivity movement in Germany, whose sharp-focused, anti-Pictorialist

enlargements of objects had exerted a strong pull on interwar English culture and

were extensively publicised in the period 1927–33.75 Indeed, many of the photo-

micrographic ‘art-books’ of the time were connected either directly (as in the case of

Blossfeldt) or by aspiration to the new German photography. World Beneath the

Microscope, for example, was part of a series published by The Studio under the title

of ‘The New Vision’, which had strong ideological affinities with Bauhaus publica-

tions (with Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision – published by Faber in 1934 – acting in

this respect as an obvious template).

Although the displacements of population brought about by the electoral success

of the Nazi Party in 1933 initially strengthened the influence of the new photography

through triggering the mass emigration of leading German photographers, photo-

graphic publishers and picture editors to England, long term, the political disruptions

Figure 5. W. Watson Baker,

Photomicrograph of ‘Sponge Spicules’, ca.

1935. Reproduced as Plate 7 in W. Watson-

Baker, World Beneath the Microscope.

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.

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of European fascism (including, infamously, the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933) led to

a broader dissatisfaction with the apoliticism of close-up nature photography –

although this was certainly not a rejection of biology, which continued to exercise

avant-garde interest until well into the latter half of the 1930s.76 Likewise, the produc-

tion of films of micro-cinematography began to be scaled down from the highpoint of

1929–33, during which nine sets of the Secrets of Nature series had been registered by

the British Film Institute. Indeed, it is notable that after 1935many (although certainly

not all) of the films made that featured micro-cinematographic sequences dealt with

heredity (such as From Generation to Generation 1938): a topic that, through its links

to the eugenics movement, was closer to contemporary socio-political than educa-

tional thought.77 Certainly, the motives of documentary film-makers began to notice-

ably shift during the 1930s, moving away from the straightforwardly pedagogic

towards using film more explicitly as a tool for propaganda: a trend that coincided

with a marked shift in film distribution methods. Film quota legislation in Britain was

institutionally biased against factual shorts and as these films typically did not require

registration with the Board of Trade there was little political incentive for exhibitors to

show natural history films. By the same token, the joint pressures of exhibitors

showing ‘sponsored’ films to increase revenues and of a public increasingly in thrall

to travelogue and ‘variety’ films meant that documentary cinema as a whole became

squeezed as a genre – the growth of the double feature programme, in this respect,

actively working against the showing of factual shorts.78

The fact that through the perceived sociological benefits of medicine and the

continuing efforts of the Eugenics Society biology remained a political issue until

well into the 1940s perhaps ensured that the bottom did not entirely fall out of the

market for photomicrographic films and books; and, certainly, ‘art-house’ photo-

journals continued to publish photomicrographs until the late 1930s. Yet while

certain feted books would be reprinted and photomicrography itself would undergo

something of a revival through the agency of the Independent Group and the Festival

of Britain in the period 1949–51,79 the belle e�poche of photomicrography – in which

close-up shots of nature were lauded as much as aesthetic curios as for their

educational value – was irrefutably fading by end of the 1930s.

Figure 6. W. A. Bentley, Photomicrograph of

a snow crystal, 1902–31. Reproduced in

Bentley and Humphreys, Snow Crystals, 186,

plate 1.

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,TheMorbid 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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