Rubber Plant

While it may have been her privileged financial and social status as the wife of a prosperous textile manufacturer that initially gave Aenne Biermann the freedom to pursue photography as a hobby, it was her own initiative that marked the progression from informal snapshots of her growing children to serious object studies that would be featured in virtually every major European photography exhibition of the period. Biermann's work was clearly informed by the numerous photographic publications of the day, but her ability to articulate a unique aesthetic within the varied output of new vision photographers won her the support of Franz Roh, who published a monograph on her work in 1930. Entitled "60 Fotos," this second book in Roh's Fotothek series opened with "Ficus elastica," or "Rubber Tree," as its first plate.
In its close-up examination of lustrous leaves this print, in all probability made for exhibition, recalls both Karl Blossfeldt's earlier, more famous plant studies of 1900-1930 and László Moholy-Nagy's principle of photography as the modulation of light. Yet, this is neither a clinically isolated plant form nor a theoretical study of light; rather, it is the observation of the play of light on a common houseplant. Perhaps it is appropriate that Biermann, both a homemaker and a photographer, should have granted us privileged access to the formal beauty of domesticated nature on its own terms.