Best-of-Booklets, art work database, and the beauty of dripstones
Found in the archive: booklets from 1955 with vintage photographs 17 x 24 cm of the series “Lichtformen” – Herbert W. Frankes personal collection of his best-of works. The photo archive of these generative photography series from 1953 to 1965 counts approximately 2.000 photos.
The foundation in co-operation with ZKM collections Karlsruhe is in preparation of an artwork databank publishing all works of Franke. They contain experimental photography like Lichtformen or Wellenformen, but also the oscillograms generated with his analog computer system: 1000 photos of the two series Oszillogramme and Tanz der Elektronen. Additionally, there will be shown works of that period in the intersection between art and science, like microscopic photography and beautiful dripstones in caves. They document Franke’s search for the beauty of nature’s wealth of forms, which he then uses artistically.
The fascinating beauty of dripstones, which Franke photographed as an aesthetic phenomenon in nature during his cave explorations since the 1940s, also led him to scientific questions. His Research on the physical formulation of the growth of stalactites in caves, first published in 1951, led Herbert to further study the fundamental mathematical principles of these aesthetics and to begin artistic generative experiments on smooth curves. Herbert explained these ideas on the mathematics of the underlying mathematical discipline of continuity in his book “Kunst und Konstruktion – Physik und Mathematik als fotografisches Experiment” in 1957.
