Erwin Blumenfeld

Holding the record for the most covers of Vogue magazine, Erwin Blumenfeld first gained acclaim in the 1930s for his avant-garde experimentations with photography. While the present image was executed during the peak of his illustrious career as a fashion photographer in the late 1940s, the technique Blumenfeld utilised is rooted to his early, subversive works.

Born in Berlin at the turn of the century, Blumenfeld was drafted in the German army as an ambulance driver during the First World War. As an escape from the violence and chaos, he frequented Galerie der Strum and Café des Westens. It was in these beating hearts of Berlin’s bohemia that he befriended key Dada artists like George Grosz and John Heartfield, who inspired him to create his first montages. Following the end of the war, Blumenfeld moved to Amsterdam where he opened a leather goods shop. The chance discovery of a fully equipped darkroom left behind by the store’s previous occupant allowed him to further experiment with photography.

In 1936, Blumenfeld relocated to Paris where he became actively involved with the French Surrealists. Largely influence by Man Ray, Blumenfeld pushed the boundaries of darkroom techniques such as solarization and photomontage. His pioneering style caught the eye of Tériade, one of the leading art publishers of the time, who featured Blumenfeld’s works in his Surrealist magazine Verve. Around the same time, Blumenfeld signed a contract with French Vogue that was soon interrupted due to the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1941, upon his release from a concentration camp during the German occupation of France, Blumenfeld fled to New York.

In America, Blumenfeld created some of his most celebrated works by applying his avant-garde aesthetic to fashion photography. The present work, from a 1947 sitting of Teddy Thurman for Vogue, brilliantly exemplifies his defiance of the traditional conventions of portraiture. Blumenfeld ingeniously combined solarisation with double-exposure to deconstruct the model’s face and show it simultaneously from multiple angles. Her manipulated features create a radical composition evoking Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portraits from the same period. This playful fusion of the figural and the abstract confirms Blumenfeld’s status as a photographer whose works transcend documentation and stand out as expressive studies of form and lighting.