Erwin Blumenfeld Research Paper

Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld was a Berlin born American photographer. He was born in Berlin on January 26 1897 to Emma Cohn and Albert Blumenfeld. In 1907, his mother Emma bought him camera as a gift. Erwin then began to experiments enthusiastically with a chemistry set and a magic lantern. In 1911 he took interest Photographic self-portraits using a mirror to obtain simultaneous frontal and profile views

Blumenfeld moved to Holland late 1918. Blumenfeld married Lena Citroen in Holland in 1921 and had three children there: Lisette, Henry Alexander and Frank Yorick. In 1923 he opens the ‘Fox Leather Company’, specialising in handbags in Amsterdam. A few years later he discovers a darkroom and begins to photograph female customers.
Exhibits at the Kunstzaal van Lier in Amsterdam and submits work to the Ullstein Verlag publishing house in Berlin for appraisal, without success. Then later in 1935, his company went completely bankrupt and her was left without confidence. In 1937, when moving to Paris Blumenfeld started to find great success in photography and advertisement, and the pictures he took sent him off to be one of the most renowned fashion photographers of all time.

He was one of the most successful fashion photographers of the first half of the 20th century.
Blumenfeld was talented in many areas, including drawing, painting, writing, and constructing Dadaistic collages. In the 1930s, he published collages mocking Adolf Hitler because of his experiences during the holocaust. In 1936, he emigrated to Paris. With the German occupation, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1940 because he was Jewish. In 1941, he could escape to the USA. He then became a US citizen in
1946.

Blumenfeld became famous for his fashion photography, working for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and also for artistic nude photography. From 1934 to 1939, he published photos in well known fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. His first photography show as an amateur was held in that city in 1934. Moving to Paris in 1936, Blumenfeld continued experimenting with nude photography and portraiture, using unusual and surrealistic combinations of lighting and exposure. His more personal work is in black and white; his commercial work in fashion, much for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is mostly in color. In both media he was a great innovator. In black and white he did all his work personally in the dark room. In color he drew on his extensive background in classical and modern painting.

Blumenfeld spent the final three decades applying what he had learned as a young artist - associating with the great artists and intellectuals of the interwar period in Berlin, Amsterdam and then Paris – to the intensely creative context of New York magazine culture in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
There, his extraordinary visual imagination, sophisticated understanding of Avant-Garde aesthetics, experimental approach to chemical photography and importantly, his commercial pragmatism were embraced by the most influential art directors and wealthy advertising clients, making Blumenfeld, the failed leather goods man, to be the highest- paid photographer in the world. So in the end, Erwin Blumenfeld put all three of his careers together; women's wear, art and
photography.

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. He died in Rome on July 4th, 1969.

The reason why i chose Erwin Blumenfeld is because of his unusual and surrealistic combinations of lighting and exposure. He brings out such a dynamic look to his photos. He is a Dadaist and most his pictures are really fun to look at because of how different they are. He also takes pictures of nude women but does it in a way to show the beauty of a woman's curves and body in an elegant way. Most of all i really like the work he’s done for Vogue & Harpers Bazaar because I'm really into fashion especially high couture fashion, and the pictures he turned into something new , even with just a basic plain background he turned it into his own unique thing.