This exhibition about the life and work of Berlin-born photographer Erwin Blumenfeld at the Jeu de Paume Gallery was one of the highlights of my recent trip to Paris. It documents his drawings, collages and photographs, from early montages during the late 1910s to work as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and the French edition of Vogue in the early 1960s. I had seen all his cover photographs for Vogue, but what I didn’t know much about were his black and white portraits and nudes, the photographs of which he cut up, solarised and transformed into abstract imagery.
Erwin Blumenfeld was born in Berlin in 1897 and was first given a camera when he was ten years old. In 1919, when he was in a self-imposed exile in the Netherlands, Blumenfeld took a deeper interest in photography and for a brief period set up an Amsterdam-based portrait studio that doubled as an exhibition space. Around this time he produced a number of quick sketches and montages that featured written and printed words, juxtaposing names, concepts and places to create ironic commentaries on political situations. The sketches, in pencil, ink and watercolour, depicted rough cartoons and acid caricatures. The photographs he took at the time, also showed the importance of finishing and perfecting in the lab, much like we would with photoshop today. Blumenfeld’s self-portraits and early nudes, heavily influenced by French-based avant-garde photographers such as Man Ray, were cropped, tightly framed, with high levels of contrast and adjustments in lighting.
Blumenfeld moved to Paris in 1936, where he exhibited his photographs at the Galerie Billiet and was introduced to leading fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, who in turn introduced him to French Vogue. When Blumenfeld made his first trip to New York following his popular set of fashion photographs of a woman daringly hanging of the Eiffel Tower, he came home with a new contract as Paris fashion correspondent for Harper’s Bazaar. He was only able to file his reports for a year before he was interned in prison camps across France. He escaped German-occupied Paris for New York and stayed there until his death in 1969.
Images courtesy Jeu de Paume, Paris
