Dripstones and Sintered Forms Series
The photo series Sintered Forms und Dripstones began in the mid-1940s. Shortly after the war, there were hardly any opportunities to travel abroad. However, the undiscovered caves in Austria allowed Franke to discover what he considered to be fantastic landscapes underground. On his descents into the darkness, which he soon undertook regularly as a member of the Vienna Cave Research Group, he was particularly fascinated by the sinter and stalactite formations, whose age was still completely undetermined at the time. However, the question of how to measure the age of dripstones using physico-chemical methods was only one side of his interest in these structures formed by nature from dripping water. His artistic ambitions were stimulated above all by the beauty of these natural forms, which are largely invisible to humans as they develop beneath the surface. He documented this beauty in numerous series, the sole purpose of which was to capture it photographically.
He quickly realized that the surface stalactites and sinter formations follows a function that can be described with the mathematics of smooth curves – the principle of continuity. This was to be of great importance for his artistic experiments, which began in 1953 in the Siemens-Reiniger photo laboratory in Erlangen. For example, he experimented with plastic tapes in the series Bandformen (band forms), which – when their two ends are glued together – also follow this principle. Nature automatically causes the surface of the closed ribbon structure to spring into the shape of a smooth curve. In his first book on art – Art and Construction – Physics and Mathematics as a Photographic Experiment – he explains in detail the significance of this principle, which he first consciously realized in stalagmites as an aestetic phenomenon examining stalactites and then investigated further in his generative photo experiments. He considered this structural principle of order to be comparable to that of symmetry, it’s significance for science and art has been discussed for centuries.
