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Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld

Country: Germany/United States
Birth: 1897 | Death: 1969

Born in Berlin in 1897 to Jewish parents, Erwin Blumenfeld began his career working as an apprentice dressmaker to Moses and Schlochauer in 1913. He opened his own company in Amsterdam in 1923, the 'Fox Leather Company', a leather goods store specialising in ladies handbags. After moving to new premises in 1932, Blumenfeld discovered a fully equipped dark room and began to photograph many of his -predominantly female- customers. The company went bankrupt in 1935, just as Blumenfeld's photographic career was beginning to take an upward turn.

Following a move to Paris in 1936, Blumenfeld was commissioned to take the portraits of personalities including George Rouault and Henri Matisse and secured his first advertising work for Monsavon. Blumenfeld quickly captured the attention of photographer Cecil Beaton who helped him secure a contract with French Vogue.

After World War II in 1941, Erwin Blumenfeld moved to New York where he was immediately put under contract by Harper's Bazaar and after three years, he began freelance work for American Vogue. Over the next fifteen years, Blumenfeld's work was featured on numerous Vogue covers and in a variety of publications including Seventeen, Glamour and House & Garden. During this period, he also worked a photographer for the Oval Room of the Dayton Department Store in Minneapolis and produced advertising campaign for cosmetics clients such as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and L'Oreal.

In the late 50s, he also began to create motion pictures, hoping to use them commercially and began work on his biography and his book My One Hundred Best Photos which, despite being a renowned fashion photographer, only included four of his fashion images. Following Blumenfeld's death in 1969, numerous books on his work have been published, namely The Naked and the Veiled by his son, Yorick Blumenfeld, and his photographs have been exhibited at international galleries including the Pompidou Gallery in Paris, The Barbican in London and The Hague Museum of Photography in the Netherlands.

In the 1960s, he worked on his autobiography which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death.

Source: Wikipedia


Erwin Blumenfeld is considered to be one of the early pioneers of fashion photography alongside George Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst. It was not only his employment of experimental techniques in the darkroom, Dada and Surrealist influences, and groundbreaking street work, but Blumenfeld’s unique and masterful combination of elegance and eroticism that transformed fashion into high art and paved the way for Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, and other photographers who enjoyed such prominence and recognition in the history of art.

In addition to holding the record for the most covers of Vogue, Blumenfeld’s works were abundantly reproduced within the pages of Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Life and Vogue during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Many of the images from these shoots will be featured in this exhibition and have since become icons of the history of fashion photography. Some have never been seen before. But all of the prints showcase not only Blumenfeld’s innovation as a photographer of fashion but also his spectacular skill as a printmaker. In his retrospective examination of Blumenfeld’s work, William Ewing writes, “His highly original and visionary work was a seamless blend of the negative and positive: taking the picture in the studio and making it in the darkroom.”

In the studio, Blumenfeld often employed mirrors, glass, and backgrounds reproduced from paintings, images of cathedrals, or mosaics of magazine covers. He often used veils, which could distort or elongate the figure, confident that a woman partially concealed was more erotically charged that one seen fully nude. He also believed the printing of the image was as every bit as important as the process of capturing it, and like Man Ray, he was tirelessly inventive in the darkroom, deploying a variety of optical and chemical tricks, including multiple exposures, solarization and bleaching.

Source: Edwynn Houk Gallery

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Flip Schulke
United States
1930 | † 2008
Flip Schulke was an American photographer, born Graeme Phillips Schulke. He grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota. Schulke's nickname "Flip" came about from his interest in gymnastics. He graduated from Macalester College, then moved to Miami. He taught briefly at the University of Miami, then began working as a freelance photographer. He worked for Life , and covered a variety of events, including the Cuban revolution. In 1962, he visited and photographed the Berlin Wall. Schulke began photographing the civil rights movement in the American south as early as 1956. He formed a bond with civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. after an all-night conversation in 1958, and began photographing him. King invited Schulke to photograph secret planning meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, though not all of the activists trusted him being there. He also photographed the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. They traveled together until King's death in 1968, which upset Schulke so much that he stopped covering the civil rights movement and began to work on more commercial projects. In all, he took around 11,000 photographs of King, including some of his funeral. Schulke photographed Muhammad Ali, Jacques Cousteau, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy. He also was a photographer for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica program in the early 1970s. Schulke died on May 15, 2008 at age 77. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin holds 300,000 of his photographs. His photographs are also held in a variety of museums, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Museum of American History, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Lehigh University Art Galleries.Source: Wikipedia My biggest problem with young photographers is that they don't think about context. They think about drama. You've got to know where to point your camera. -- Flip Schulke When the Berlin Wall came down, thousands of people from around the world converged to celebrate the end of over 40 years of a divided Europe. Among them was American photojournalist Flip Schulke, who had visited the wall many times since it was erected in 1961 in an attempt to document what he described as "man's physical ability to build a bastion between himself and his own dignity, if he tries hard enough". As he mingled with the crowd, he heard on their lips not a German protest song, but the famous American civil rights anthem "We shall overcome". It was a song he knew well. As a photojournalist in the 1950s and 1960s, Schulke captured many significant moments in the nation's struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, such as the marches to end segregation from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and Martin Luther King's funeral in 1968. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Schulke brought his civil rights experiences with him as he attempted to capture the wall's symbolic and physical power. "This is the wall that fear built," Schulke wrote in notes during his visit to the wall in 1962. "This was the wall where hate stood guard, and men stooped much lower than angels. On one side it was bright and clean from the sun of freedom. (On) the other dark and bitter - the rot of slavery." Comprised of bricks, mortar, steel wire and jagged glass fragments to deter climbers, the wall both appalled and shocked Schulke, who described it as having a "jerry built" look. "It just can't be real," he noted, adding that the wall was a "monument to human misery" that "splits the world in half like a melon". He recalled how on the western side German children played tag in the shadows of tank traps while on the other side children stood "dull-eyed and pinch-faced in darkened doorways - wondering how one learns to laugh". As East German guards looked at him through their binoculars, Schulke observed recent East German escapees in West Berlin standing near the wall and signaling to friends and relatives back in East Berlin or waiting for relatives to appear. "One woman waited five hours to see her mother who never turned up," Schulke wrote. "Another couple stood by the River Spree, the girl crying softly, trying to catch a glimpse of her mother across the river." During Schulke's early coverage of the civil rights movement, he had a relatively balanced journalistic outlook and tried to see both sides, says Gary Truman, a long-time friend and former colleague. "But that faded quickly because he said that sometimes there is no other reasonable opposite view, there was only right and wrong," Truman says. "I think his coverage of the Berlin Wall stated immediately: this simply is wrong." Schulke saw both the wall and the civil rights movement as part of "a greater conflict over universal human freedoms," says Truman, who became the archivist of Schulke's photo collection after the photographer's death in 2008. "Similarities always exist in the artist's eyes." Schulke was far from alone in seeing the parallels between division in America and in Berlin. Even before the famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech by President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy came to Berlin as US Attorney General in February 1962. "For a hundred years, despite out protestations of equality, we had, as you know, a wall of our own - a wall of segregation erected against Negroes," Kennedy said. "That wall is coming down."Source: BBC
Richard Misrach
United States
1949
Richard Misrach (born 1949) is an American photographer "firmly identified with the introduction of color to 'fine' [art] photography in the 1970s, and with the use of large-format traditional cameras" (Nancy Princenthal, Art in America). David Littlejohn of the Wall Street Journal calls Misrach "the most interesting and original American photographer of his generation," describing his work as running "parallel to that of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, two German contemporaries." Littlejohn notes that all three used a large scale color format that defied the expectations of fine art photography at the time. Misrach is widely recognized as "one of this century’s most internationally acclaimed photographers." He is perhaps best known for his depictions of the deserts of the American west, and for his series documenting the changes brought to bear on the environment by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic." Describing his philosophy, Tracey Taylor of the New York Times writes that "[Misrach's] images are for the historical record, not reportage." Misrach has been married since 1989 to writer Myriam Weisang and has a son, Jake, from his first marriage to Debra Bloomfield. Misrach's book Desert Cantos received the 1988 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and his Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, co-authored with Myriam Weisang Misrach, was awarded the 1991 PEN Center West Award for a nonfiction book. His Katrina monograph Destroy This Memory won Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. He has received numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for a Publication, and the Distinguished Career in Photography Award from the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 he received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography. In 2010, Apple licensed Misrach's 2004 image Pyramid Lake (at Night) as the inaugural wallpaper for the first iPad. The opening credits of the 2014 HBO series True Detective featured a montage of images from Misrach's Petrochemical America. In 2016, the AIGA selected Border Cantos for its "50 Books | 50 Covers" competition, a "survey of the best in book design represent[ing] perhaps the longest-standing legacy in American graphic design." Source: Wikipedia Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. A recent chapter of the series, Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands. This work was exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and San Jose Museum of Art in 2016-17. In the most recent chapters, Premonitions and The Writing on the Wall, Misrach documents graffiti on abandoned buildings throughout the Southwest and Southern California, finding an angry and ominous response to the highly charged political climate before and after the 2016 election. Both series premiered at Fraenkel Gallery in 2017. Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, the study of weather, time, color and light in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and On The Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one series, he has experimented with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera. In fall 2012, in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Misrach launched a major book and exhibition entitled Petrochemical America, which addresses the health and environmental issues associated with our dependency on oil. Source: Fraenkel Gallery
Michael Anker
I entered the professional side of photography during my studies in graphic design. It was then that I discovered the rich tonality and depth of tones that can be found in analog black-and-white photos. My photography teacher at the time, Manfred Paul, provided the necessary inspiration. Nowadays, I execute the majority of my projects using analog methods once again. This approach allows me to alleviate the time pressure from the creative process. "The Dark River" from the cycle "Remember me?" For several years, I have been working on my photographic series "Remember Me," which explores traces of my cultural identity. At the same time, it serves as a long-term study of the relationship between people and landscapes. My focus is on two topographies that lie beyond media attention: the Oderbruch region on the northeastern border of Germany and Poland, and the former German-speaking enclave of Hirschenhof in present-day Latvia. Both areas, which have undergone significant changes, are also imbued with traces of the last great war. My family stories are rooted in these places. The first part of the series, "The Dark River," presented here, tells the story of my father's family's deep connection with nature. The subsequent second part, "The Dark Silence," will explore the migration and flight of my maternal family. Without explicitly stating it, the work invites reflection on the fact that economically or politically motivated migration has always existed. The anchor point of "The Dark River" is the Oder River, which today forms the border between Germany and Poland. Along the Oder, my father's family witnessed the two-and-a-half-century-long transformation of the once primeval river and swamp landscape into an agrarian cultural area, initiated by the Prussian King Frederick II. This region also saw one of the fiercest battles of World War II in 1945. It was here, after the war, that my father met my mother's family, who had reached the Oderbruch on a trek from the Wartheland/Poland. They later met while dancing at the "Schwarzer Adler" in Seelow. In "The Dark River," long-buried memories and dreams resurface. Calm and dark, the Oder flows, filled with memories of itself and the people along its banks. The sky reflects in it, even at night. Dark shallows remain hidden. Sluggish like the stream, life moves through the plains, carrying my own family history with it. Where the landscape is left undisturbed, it recalls its own fertility and the myths that once surrounded it. Scars in its terrain remind it of its vulnerability, keeping the pain alive, and these scars grow deceptively. The images are captured on 120 film, which I believe is the only suitable format for processing history and stories in an epic way.
Michal Korta
Poland
1975
Michał Korta, born and raised in Poland, is an award-winning portrait and documentary photographer based near Kraków. He studied Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and German Literature at Jagiellonian University. Korta’s work spans collaborations with press, publishers, and agencies, alongside personal projects across Central Asia, the United States, Israel, the Balkans, and Africa. His photography explores themes of identity, social dynamics, and the layers of history within landscapes and people. He has published three photography books, including Balkan Playground, nominated as one of Poland’s best photo books in 2018. His photographs have been exhibited across Europe and beyond, and he lectures on photography in Poland and Switzerland. Recently, Korta has focused on portraiture and long-term personal projects, continuing to merge intimate storytelling with striking visual narratives. Statement "For years, I have been irresistibly drawn to the art of capturing the essence of creators—artists, musicians, writers, painters, composers, directors, and actors. Through my lens, I strive to craft portraits that are both unadorned and striking, each frame a vivid testament to their singular personality and unyielding spirit. I believe in the power of simplicity and the devotion to craft—the delicate art of feeling the sitter's energy, observing and shaping the light to honor presence. I’a a worshiper of natural light. Even if sometimes I have to modify it according to needs. Light is god." Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 48
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