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ERWIN BLUMENFELD E
rwin Blumenfeld was a American-German photographer best known for his editorial photographs, experimental fine art works, and portraits of cultural icons. Often in both his independent and commissioned works, the artist combined black-and-white images with small areas of bright, vibrant color. He is also commonly associated with Hitler, Face of Terror, which was part of a satirical series emphasizing the dictator’s needlessly violent reign. Born on January 26, 1897 in Berlin, Germany, Blumenfeld worked as an amateur photographer during his childhood. Following World War I, the artist began working professionally and garnered international attention for his portraits of artists Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. In 1937, he began working for French Vogue, and became wellknown around the world for his shoots with Josephine Baker and Carmen Dell’Orefice. During World War II, the artist was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for two years, on account of his Jewish heritage, and was released in 1941 to travel to New York for work. In the post-World War II era, he was the highest paid photographer in the world and in high demand for editorial photo shoots. Blumenfeld died on January 4, 1969 in Rome, Italy. His work is currently held in the collections of the Riksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Erwin Blumenfeld’s early career began in an older photographic age. Born in Germany in 1897, his business took off in the 30s, where he photographed customers at his leather goods shop in Amsterdam. From the start he was very much influenced by the idea of photography as art, valuing sincerity above commercial considerations. He saw himself not as a photojournalist, but as someone who explored how best to show a fashionable object without documenting it. His life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. In the first years of his career, he worked only in black and white, but as soon as it became technically possible he enthusiastically used color. He transferred his experiences with black-and-white photography to color; applying them to the field of fashion, he developed a particularly original repertoire of forms. The female body became Erwin Blumenfeld’s principal subject. In his initial portrait work, then the nudes he produced while living in Paris and, later on, his fashion pho-
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