Robert Voit: The Alphabet of New Plants

Robert Voit photographs artificial flowers. In The Alphabet of New Plants the blooms first read like botanical plates, and the illusion holds until a stem’s plastic contour or the woven grain of a fabric leaf comes clear. The cover shows a single fern-like specimen in black and white. Hatje Cantz published the book in November 2015: 179 pages, 81 photographs, hardcover, 264 by 319 millimetres, with German and English texts.

The series takes the form of an archive. Voit gathers manufactured plants of the kind produced in quantity and in endless variation for decoration, and works within the conventions of natural-history imagery; the flowers are made of plastic and fabric, and exist to stand in for real ones. The title names its reference openly — Karl Blossfeldt’s The Alphabet of Plants of 1928 — and the pictures play with the indexical habit such images depend on, turning a photographic language built on close description of growing things toward manufactured objects.

What holds the attention is the exactness of the looking: the scruffy outline of a moulded stem, the structure of the fabric used for leaves — details the eye slides past on a shop shelf. The publisher calls the book a charming game with illusion, and the game is conducted through close attention to surface and material. The more precisely a substitute is described, the more convincingly it passes, and the more plainly its manufacture shows; both effects sit in the same frame.

Texts are by Steffen Siegel and Christoph Schaden. The series was shown at Robert Morat Galerie from 7 February to 4 April 2015, the year the book appeared. For collectors drawn to photography that works through the codes of scientific illustration, this volume gathers 81 photographs made along a single line of inquiry, with the two authors’ contributions and the photographs presented in an edition carrying both German and English.

An album of the most beautiful flowers – yet something seems off, be it the unclean outline of a plastic stem or the fabric textures of the leaves. They are artificial flowers, mass-produced today and

Texts by: Steffen Siegel, Christoph Schaden
German, English
November 2015, 179 Pages , 81 Photos
hardcover
264mm x 319mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-4046-3

Publisher page editorial text:
| A charming game with illusion
An album with the most beautiful flowers—yet something does not seem to be right, be it the scruffy contours of a stem made of plastic or the structure of the fabric used for the leaves. These are artificial flowers like those that are mass produced today

Publisher source ↗