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Text in German. Introduction by Otto Dannenberg. With a tipped-in frontispiece photographic portrait of the photographer and 120 b&w photogravure plates from photographs by Karl Blossfeldt. 32.4x24.5 cm (12¾x9¾") blue cloth lettered in gilt. First Edition. 

The third volume of Blossfeldt's three volume masterpiece. Karl Blossfeldt, a lecturer at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (The institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum, Berlin), was looking for a way to showcase examples of the forms and patterns he had discovered in the natural world that he believed would inspire his students' own work. An excellent sculptor, he first created a large, finely modeled dragonfly's wing, but this was dismissed as trivial by the school's director. Blossfeldt came up with an idea of making greatly enlarged photographs of the insect instead. “This [first] enlargement proved to be most useful to me in my studies, and thus I hit upon the use of enlarged photographs of small plant forms to assist as yet unskilled students in their work," Blossfeldt recalled in 1929. "It is due to this incident and this photograph that I am now publishing my enlarged plant photographs."  The organic botanical forms appear almost ghost-like on the page, hinting at surrealism and abstraction.