Monday 21 October 2013

ESSAY by Ashley Lumb: In Focus: Erwin Blumenfeld

The photographer Erwin Blumenfeld once said: "My life began with the discovery of the magic of chemistry, the interplay of shade and light and the double edged problem of positive and negative." Through a variety of techniques, from solarisation to montage and including the use of mirrors, much of Blumenfeld's work emphasizes artistic duality. 

Blumenfeld began photographing in 1930, when he found a fully equipped darkroom, hidden behind a wall, in his Amsterdam leather goods shop. Through his photography, Blumenfeld began to value truthfulness over commercial considerations and became deeply inspired by the idea of photography as art. Blumenfeld's involvement with the Dada movement in 1921 facilitated the production of a series of extraordinary collages. This lead to the photographer becoming the President of the Amsterdam Dada along with Vice President Paul Citroen, who was the only other member.  He was first widely published in the French magazine PHotographie in 1935, followed by a group exhibition at the Nieuwe Kunst School (New Art School) in Amsterdam with Man Ray, Grosz, Leger, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, and Schwitters. In 1938, Blumenfeld met Cecil Beaton who helped secure him a contract at French Vogue. That year he took one of his best know Parisian photos, an image of model Lisa Fonssagrives, Irving Penn's wife, standing on the edge of the Eiffel tower. Blumenfeld's one year contract with French Vogue, however, was not renewed. Finally, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1942 where he continued his photography work with magazines, such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Look, and Cosmopolitan. By the mid-1950, Blumenfeld was one of the highest paid photographers in the world.

Inspired by Brassai and the surrealist photographer Man Ray, Blumenfeld maintained an invested interest in the dream world. While he had no formal connections to surrealism, influences from the movement are evident in most of his work. He used complex techniques to endow his subjects with a touch of surrealism and frequently used methods such as wet silk, screens, angles and shadows, which gave his work a combination of abstraction and expressionism. A very competent technician in the darkroom, Blumenfeld also frequently used the technique of solarisation: turning on a light during photographic development to create tone reversals and dark outlines. All of these contrived compositions and effects held an irregular beauty to them but also, at times, overshadowed the subject. 

Photography and surrealism share a fascination with duality and the mirrored reflection. In particular, Blumenfeld's work evidences this shared fascination. The surrealist qualities rendered by his photographs are located within a discourse of a kind of aesthetic dualism. He demonstrates this duality through the use of positive versus negative images, the use of strong light and shadows, as well as solarisation techniques. His nudes employ the use of mirrors; dividing the body into two distorted parts. This oscillation between flesh and mirror, light and dark, makes these nudes extremely powerful. His double portrait images depict a mirrored image of the model, but on closer inspection each side-by-side images remains slightly different, and this contains an affinity harking back to the days of the stereoscope which was invested in the late 1800's. 

Blumenfeld's photos showcase the artist's fluency with the Dadaist vernacular as much as the fashion he helped to promote.  Through is masterful technique Blumenfeld transformed his women and their clothes into elements resembling collage. "Day and night I try," he once noted, "in my studio with its six two-thousand watt suns, balancing between extremes of the impossible, to shake loose the real from the unreal, to give visions body, to penetrate into unknown transparencies." These accompanying fashion images are provocatively beautiful, dramatic, radical and experimental. As evidenced with his long standing history of Dada work, fashion photography however was not an exclusive interest. Nude photographs of Blumenfeld's personal work should be considered of equal importance. As a child, Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger's misogynistic writings on the inferiority of women deeply impacted the photographer. Later, as an adult, Blumenfeld became obsessed with the concept of a uniquely feminine beauty. He once declared "How seriously I take beauty! All my portraits reflect my vision. The artist lives on variations of a single theme." While perhaps a concentration on the ambiguous theme of the aesthetically beautiful can be considered Blumenfeld's "single theme," here his work is considered beneath the unique lens of binary juxtapositions, duality, and forms of stereoscopy.

Blumenfeld's nude beauties were often detached and veiled, not from prudishness but rather in a Freudian playful evocation of the hidden subconscious. While this reflects Blumenfeld's pursuit of nude photography his entire life and a personal indulgence to acclaim "the eternal feminine, the fetishes of my life: eyes, hair, breasts, mouth," it also points to an interest in the interplay between what can be revealed, concealed, insinuated, and perpetuated within a given image. As captivated with the nude as Edward Weston, Blumenfeld's experimental tendencies resulted in subjecting the body to a number of photographic techniques and tricks. One of these was a nude body shot under wet silk which was derived from his childhood discovery that Botticelli and Cranach had depicted their nudes even more naked by covering them with transparent veils. Despite his lengthy career in fashion, Blumenfeld considered his nude studies to be the best and most important part of his work. Fourteen of his sensational nudes were published in the surrealist art journal, Verve, in 1938, a series which can now be viewed in the book The Naked and the Velied: The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld, published in 1999 by Thames and Hudson. 


Erwin Blumenfeld's work remains as fresh and innovative today as it was in the photos taken for the 1940's for Vogue. The development of his personal sleek style divided the photographic space and was marked by an extravagant artificiality. His photographic impact has been far-reaching, with leading photographers such as David Bailey and Nick Knight citing Blumenfeld's influence on their work. Fashion photographer Solve Sundsbo commented recently "Blumenfeld was shooting 60 years ago what the rest of us will be shooting in 10 years time." An artistic interlocutor focused on artificiality and the double, Blumenfeld's work continues to resonate today.