wonder der bloemen

Filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891-1954) was a pioneer of time-lapse photography, using it to record the tiny lives of micro-organisms. He wanted to show in film what otherwise would be visible only to the most tenacious gaze through a microscope. In this way the public was plunged into the life inside a droplet of water or sucked-up into the bloodstream of a frog. A highlight in his work are the images of crystallisation. Using common photographic chemicals his recordings under great magnification of the crystallisation processes revealed wonderful abstract patterns.

Mol was much admired for his ‘zeitraffers’, a procedure in which a picture was taken of a flower or plant every 15 to 30 minutes, when some curtains would open and lights would go on. This way a set of images was line-up into a film. The public would be amazed by seeing a plant flower in a matter of seconds. This archive material from the collection of the Amsterdam filmmuseum is made available by Ton Söder for a show at the Foamlab in Amsterdam and is projected over the full with of the window.