Erwin Blumenfeld

Every page is seen by millions of people and we are responsible for the taste of tomorrow. Our pictures are the essence itself of a page and every page has to have its own face, its own spirit, to catch millions of eyes or it's only a scrap of printed matter. --Erwin Blumenfeld.

Erwin Blumenfeld was one of the most sought-after and best-paid fashion photographers of his time, shooting for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Life. Influenced by the surrealists and the artistic avant-gardes, he challenged the genre's conventions in his early fashion photographs with fascinating originality and perfection. Although Blumenfeld left to posterity a considerable oeuvre of color photographs, so far only his magazine spreads were really known. For this volume, the original slides were recovered from Blumenfeld's extensive archive and digitally reconstructed. His compositions can thus be seen for the first time in their original form and colorfulness.

In the 1940s Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) became one of America's top fashion photographers, and eventually the highest paid photographer in the world. His work for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar remains influential. But before he arrived in New York--fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris via Morocco in 1941--he spent his twenties in Amsterdam. This first major book to focus on Blumenfeld's early work picks up all the elements that drove his later fame. As a failing shop owner who made portraits of his clients for extra money while also experimenting with Dadaist photocollage, Blumenfeld already had a playful, improvisational style--the beginnings of the slightly surreal lighting and styling that would one day earn him comparisons to Cecil Beaton and Man Ray. Of his shop's 1935 bankruptcy, he later wrote "And so, when there was really no way out, I became a photographer." These are the roots of that fortuitous second career.