Sherrie Levine, After Blossfeldt 1–20, 1990

Narrator: Levine’s After Blossfeldt is a series of twenty images drawn from the photographer’s body of work. Blossfeldt worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, gathering plant materials, cleaning them up, isolating them against a solid background, and magnifying them in photographs.

Carrie Springer: The very act of re-presenting them opens them up to all sorts of references that might not have been a part of Blossfeldt's work.

Narrator: Carrie Springer is a senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney.

Carrie Springer:He was clearly looking at the relationship between the plant forms and forms in art. However, her re-presentation of them really makes that so much more apparent.

I think that she gives us the opportunity to look at them in a lot of different ways. That's not to say that Blossfeldt himself and his original vision is not important. She just brings that to us. She brings us the forms, which are incredible, which are incredibly sensuous, which are incredibly complex, which have elements that are both, kind of, cold and warm at the same time. And she brings them to us in these images that leave it in our hands or in our minds with our intuition, to make all the connections that we might make. They may be hers, they may not be hers. But they can be ours. And that's one of the most interesting aspects of it, to me.