Still Life with Pineapple and Cactus

 Although she initially trained as a painter, Florence Henri discovered the camera as a student at the Bauhaus, which had become a center for photographic experimentation under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia. Like many of her fellow students, Henri worked in a variety of techniques, including negative prints and multiple exposures. Some of her most spatially challenging images, however, are straight photographs of everyday objects. Henri featured mirrors in a number of her still lifes, their reflective surfaces enabling her to fracture the photographic space into sharply angled shapes, such as the fragmented forms of this spiky cactus and pineapple.