The Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, who has died aged 64 following a lung transplant, straddled the world of artwork, promoting and vogue pictures with a luxurious cinematic and painterly aesthetic. Into his meticulously staged works he launched refined imperfections to stir disquiet in his viewers: “There needs to be a riddle in each highly effective picture, so you might be intrigued and invited to look again and again.”
He was influenced by the storytelling energy of cinema and the emotion it might provoke. He wished to create an open-ended narrative in a single shot, to seize the second between what simply occurred and what’s about to occur. In 2014 he stated: “I used to wish to conquer the world with sturdy photos, however these days I wish to say to the viewer: I’ll provide the components, you make the story.”
Olaf started as a controversial determine, striving to subvert established norms, problem taboos and rejoice range. His first inspiration, one which “struck me like lightning” as a pupil, was Weegee’s Transvestite/The Homosexual Deceiver c1939, {a photograph} with a celluloid high quality that might stick with him and turn out to be a motif of his work. Different influences have been the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Joel-Peter Witkin, however he additionally drew inspiration from the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Jan Steen and George Hendrik Breitner.
Whereas dwelling in a squat in Amsterdam within the Eighties, Olaf started photographing town’s nightlife and the homosexual liberation motion, exploring sexuality in stark black and white photos.
In 1988 he accomplished a sequence of photos known as Chessmen. Comprising 32 sadomasochistic erotic tableaux impressed by medieval chess items, Chessmen crystallised the best way he wished to current his work: as a sequence of thematically linked, single pictures. It was his breakthrough second and Olaf was awarded first prize within the 1988 Younger European Photographer competitors. A ebook of the work was revealed and his first main solo exhibition opened at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
Regardless of his underground, radical beginnings, his sheer expertise, mastery of the medium and innate affinity with the traditions of Dutch artwork quickly meant he was embraced by the mainstream in his homeland. In 2013, he designed the brand new Dutch euro cash based mostly on his portrait of King Willem-Alexander. He took the official state portraits of the Dutch royal household in 2018, which have been was the royal Christmas card and issued as postage stamps. The next yr, on his sixtieth birthday, there was a double exhibition of his work in The Hague, and one on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, that includes core work from the five hundred gadgets he donated to the museum.
Born Erwin Olaf Springveld within the city of Hilversum to Simon Springveld, a gross sales supervisor for an workplace provides firm, and Alida (nee Van ’t Hoff), he moved with the household to Hoevelaken in 1967 and attended secondary college in Amersfoort. In 1977 he enrolled on the College of Journalism in Utrecht, however in his second yr, a pictures tutor noticed that Erwin was sad and invited him to one among his courses: “I felt comfy with the medium instantly, [it] felt like a homecoming.”
After graduating in 1980, he assisted a photojournalist in Amsterdam for 2 years, whereas additionally documenting the homosexual scene. He cherished the theatre of the golf equipment, the experimentation with persona and gender identification. He gained his first fee from Vinyl, a music journal, and was revealed in queer magazines and newspapers.
However he wished to create his personal actuality, his personal surrealist dreamworld. He dropped his surname, and his 35mm Nikon digital camera, and purchased a second-hand medium-format Hasselblad, which might carry a extra formal high quality to his edgy work.
Inspired to be true to his personal instincts by his then companion and muse, the militant homosexual activist Teun Frieszo, Olaf arrange a rudimentary studio. He photographed associates from the queer scene and made cash taking portraits however, following his success with Chessmen, lastly had the liberty to discover his personal creative imaginative and prescient extra totally.
He launched color and digital manipulation into his work, which grew to become extra expansive, characterised by forensic consideration to element. His staff of assistants, wardrobe artists, location scouts and set builders helped him produce flawlessly lit and dressed photos that depicted mysterious fairy tales, although behind every stunning facade lies a fissure, signified by an uneasy pose or an incongruous element.
He produced work for vogue magazines reminiscent of Vogue and Elle, and firms reminiscent of Heineken, Microsoft, Bottega Veneta and Diesel Denims, for which he received the 1999 Silver Lion on the Cannes promoting competition. All the photographs he created have been as worthy of being hung in museums as billboards.
Olaf’s private work continued to be provocative: Mature (1999) depicts aged girls as sensual supermodels; Vogue Victims (2000) highlights the consumerism of designer labels; and Royal Blood (2000), a sequence of portraits exhibiting historic figures who got here to a sticky finish, together with a Princess Diana lookalike, explores the general public fascination with fame and violence.
This century, he pared again the digital artifice and started to provide work that posed deeper philosophical questions, reminiscent of within the sequence Separation (2003), Hope (2005), Grief (2005) and Keyhole (2011). In Palm Springs (2018), shot in a stylised documentary vogue that juxtaposes fashions wearing Nineteen Sixties clothes inside fashionable landscapes, “actuality creeps into the paradise we’ve tried so arduous to take care of”. Im Wald (2020) highlights the detached energy of nature within the face of human vanity.
From 2008 Olaf was represented within the UK by Hamiltons Gallery in Mayfair. In 2011 he obtained the Johannes Vermeer award, the Dutch state prize for the humanities and, in 2019, was made a knight within the Order of the Netherlands Lion. His 2019 exhibitions coincided with the publication of a monograph, Erwin Olaf: I Am.
Attributable to hereditary emphysema, he underwent the lung transplant with the hope that it might lengthen his life. On his dying, the Dutch royal household issued a press release mourning the nation’s lack of “a singular, exceptionally gifted photographer and an awesome artist”. An artist who, from day one, made pictures impressed by a query posed by his pictures tutor, a query he requested of himself and of his viewers all through his life: “What’s regular?”
He’s survived by his husband, Kevin Ray Edwards, whom he married in Amsterdam in 2016, and his brothers, Jos and Ron.
