Erwin Olaf

Silver

 

Silver. Photographs by Erwin Olaf. Texts by Olaf, Kees Van Twist, Jonathan Turner, Willem Elias, and Ruud Schenk. In Dutch and English. Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2005. 271 pages. Small folio. Second edition. Red embossed leatherette covered boards with tipped in color illustration. Profusely illustrated in color and black and white, some fold-outs, bibliography.

 

Good plus. Boards show moderate wear. Abrasions to the top edge both boards. Abrasions to the side edge rear board. Upper corners frayed. Lower corners bumped. Scratches visible in the light. Light wear to the head and heel of the spine. Tipped in photo is clean with scratches visible in the light. Internally crisp. A couple of soil spots. Tanning to page edges. Binding beginning to loosen. All pages present and intact.  

 

Erwin Olaf, one of the best know and most over-the-top Dutch photographers of today--lives a passionate, lusty affair with life, enjoying it to the fullest extent, a true gastronome of the art of living. His oeuvre stands as a manifestation of this very passion and of his very genuine engagement with his subjects. Over the last 25 years, he has evolved from a photographer who captures reality to a director who creates it; either way, the depicted reality is one filled with humor, imagination, sexuality, and exuberance, raising issues of freedom, beauty, loneliness, and difference. A master who can generate his own, perverse world through autonomous photographic series, grandiose parties, and film projects alike, he is also hypercritical, an artist from whom nothing escapes. Thus his fictions are convincing, his images full of bygone days, fairytales, and dreams, populated by historical figures, elves, dwarves, lunatics, and creatures that defy easy description.

 

From the Gronninger Museum (translated from the Dutch):

"With 'Silver' the Gronninger Museum presents a survey of 25 years of Erwin Olaf's photography. This retrospective includes a wide selection from his much-discussed autonomous work. In addition there is a selection from Olaf's documentary and advertising photography, and various films and videos he has made are being shown. Erwin Olaf is one of the few Dutch photographers who has been successful in both the advertising world and the gallery and museum circuit. He began as a photojournalist for international papers like 'The Advocate' and 'The Gay Times', but in 1984 learned the art of the monumental studio portrait from he choreographer-photographer Hans van Manen.

 

To the-until then well-behaved--tradition of the Dutch glamour portrait Olaf added invigorating elements such as fantasy, humor and eroticism. Since the series 'Chessmen' (1988) autonomous work has formed the core of his oeuvre. Later followed notable projects such as 'Mind of their Own' (1995) and 'Mature' (2000), in which Olaf photographed young people with Down's syndrome and aged women like real glamour models. In 1993 the city of Groningen commissioned him to make the series 'Table for Ten'. For 'Paradise 2001' Olaf has expanded his frontiers with the aid of computer manipulation, to give a suggestive picture of the party culture."

 

"Though the adolescents in the photographs in Fall (2008) have the stylized perfection so characteristic of Olaf’s work, they are not perfect examples of our current ideal of beauty. Their curious expressions are determined to a large extent by the fact that the images were taken as they were blinking. This makes it unclear what the models are actually feeling, what their real emotions are. The combination with still lifes of flowers and the title of the series highlight what may very well be the key theme of Fall – the transient nature of beauty. The exhibition in The Hague Museum of Photography will be the series world premiere." 

 

"Blinking is the moment in photography we all hate. You know – all those photos from birthdays and dinner parties when your eyes are half shut. But last year I found I was intrigued by an image I had made when a girl model blinked just as I was pushing the button. I started to think about it. Why was this intriguing? It was about photography, and it was about a non-emotion, and yet that moment of blinking also suggested another emotion, one that was not actually there. So I started to explore it more, photographing boys and girls blinking. One of them was this boy, Felix."--Excerpt from Erwin Olaf's best shot, The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009

           

Uncommon.