Europäischer Monat der Fotografie Berlin - Artists (in alphabetic order)

Blue Herbs

Plant photograms by Gerolf Schülke

Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem / FU Berlin

Gerolf Schülke: Gelbluzerne / Medicago falcata
o. J © Gerolf Schülke
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The Düsseldorf sculptor and graphic artist Gerolf Schülke has been taking photographs of meadow herbs since 2005. The pictures are taken in the south of Finland in the sunny summer months.

The pictures are created without a camera, as photograms on light-sensitive cyanotype paper. The blue colouring of the developed photographic paper, on which the plants show up in varying degrees of brightness, lends an abstract note to their appearance and gives a distanced, floating impression. Cyanotypography is a historic photographic process, also known as blueprint. It was invented in 1842. The prepared paper is exposed to sunlight and then simply developed in water.

For this exhibition, Gerolf Schülke has enlarged his cyanotype prints to inkjet prints three times the original size. The effect and character of the small originals remain intact, though the enlargement lends a higher degree of abstraction to the image.