Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was a german photographer. His strongly erotic drapery achieved with wet clothes have been copied by many photographers after him. He was born in Berlin. After working in several different fields, he began to work as a professional photographer only in 1936. A friend of Georg Grosz since 1915, he was close to the Dadaist movement, and that would have a strong effect on his artistic and photographic education. Starting in 1938 he worked for the French edition of Vogue, and starting in 1939 for Harper’s Baazar. Beaton was his inspirational godfather. In 1941, escaping from occupied France and a concentration camp, he landed in New York. His color and black-and-white pictures, characterized by graphic rigor and a strong poetic ambiguity, are almost always the result of manipulation during developing. Blumenfeld retired from photography at the end of the 1950s to devote himself to his autobiography, Jadis et Daguerre. In 1978 he had an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in 1982 one at the Centre Pompidou.