Beautiful in black & white: Ernst Röttger and Google image searches
I was looking for information about Ernst Röttger’s series of books from the 1970s as had some (poor quality, sorry!) pics I’d grabbed when a tutor brought in his copy of Clay Craft into college one day.
Not surprisingly, second hand copies of the books in the Creative Play series go for up to £50 (although you can get print on demand ones cheaper; they don’t have the fab duotone covers though).
I think there were 7 in the series; paper, wood, clay, fabric, metal, ? and ?. They all feature exercises to demonstrate various techniques with each material, mainly black & white photographs of example objects (although he emphasises the creative process, rather than the end result), along with a simple layout.
I can’t find anything – online, admittedly – about the man himself though.
As an aside, sometimes the Google image search results are just beautiful in and of themselves…
Image search for Ernst Röttger:
Image search for Karl Blossfeldt (a German photographer, sculptor, teacher and artist, late 19C / early 20C):
Image search for Ernst Haeckel (a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist, early 19C / early 20C):
