Biography

Discussion

Over a short period of time, Erwin Olaf has evolved from a commissioned photographer to the ‘enfant terrible’ of staged photography. Bizarre and baroque fairy tales depicting alternating visions of aggression, tenderness, power, and powerlessness are what draw his typically young followers.

Olaf became a photographer through the influence of Dirk van der Spek, an instructor of photography at the School voor Journalistiek (‘School of Journalism’) in Utrecht. As a full-time student in journalism, he also took Van der Spek’s classes in photography. Olaf took his first portrait of the artist Marthe Röling for the school’s newspaper. After having completed his studies and experiencing several taxing encounters in the world of journalism, Olaf decided to exchange his pen for a camera. He came into contact with André Ruigrok, a professional photographer in Landsmeer, who offered him an internship. As Ruigrok’s assistant, Olaf was able to master the most relevant technical skills within a short period of time.

One-and-a-half years later, Olaf was taking on his own independent commissions. He responded to various summonses for photographic work, including a notice in Sek, the official publication of the gay and lesbian organisation COC (Cultuur en ontspanningscentrum, ‘Centre for Culture and Leisure’, an organisation). Through this commission, Olaf came into contact with Hans van Manen, a Dutch dance choreographer and an avid photographer himself. Van Manen gave Olaf advice on how to accomplish the maximum with a minimum of means. With just one lamp and two flashes, Olaf mastered the use of lighting with his models.

With his own private studio, a recently purchased Hasselblad with an 80mm lens, and ample technical insight, Olaf laid the basis for a photographic oeuvre that these days continues to expand at a tremendous pace.

A significant proportion of Olaf’s clientele exemplifies the gay rights movement. Olaf himself credits the take-off of his career to his photos for magazines such as Gai-Pied, The Advocate, Rosa Flieder, and Sek, which all provided the perfect ambiance for his sometimes controversial photography. His early work still bears the quality of photographic reportage quality, to a large extent influenced by André Ruigrok’s working approach. A number of photos from this period have been collected in the book Stadsgezichten (‘Cityscapes’) from 1985. They have little in common with Olaf’s later work, in which he takes complete charge of both the thematic content and composition. During this early period, Olaf photographs more or less random situations of friends in an intoxicated state, or people who spontaneously stop to pose for him when they see him with his camera. In his reportage work, Olaf in fact already presents himself as a portraitist.

In his first years working as a photographer, Olaf’s choice of models for his portraits betrayed a personal preoccupation with the male body. Joy, a photo taken in 1985 depicting a young man with champagne shooting out of a bottle is a good example of Olaf’s homo-erotic imagery dating from this period. It was this photo that brought him notoriety among a large segment of the population. Published by Art Unlimited in Amsterdam, the picture postcard version of this image exceeded sales of 250,000. In his later work, beautiful male models are combined with or replaced by eccentric or bizarre figures. Here the accent lies less clearly on erotica, leaning more in the direction of suggestive fantasies.

The personal style that Olaf developed halfway through the 1980s found its definitive form particularly in the his portraits shot for the magazines Focus, Haagse Post, and Vinyl. The editorial departments of these magazines gave him substantial artistic freedom. In his commissioned work—just as in his autonomous work—Olaf tried to excite his audience in a unique way by inspiring amazement through fascinating, sometimes even shocking photos. It was a successful concept, with Olaf’ soon becoming an established name. Especially his portraits appearing in the Haagse Post drew a tremendous response from art directors and other clients. Olaf was approached to do advertising campaigns for clothing brands, magazines, theatrical companies, record companies, AIDS campaigns, and a steady stream of publications for various gay rights organisations.

In early 1988, Olaf decided to temporarily suspend taking on commissions for a period of three months. His aim was to devote his time solely to the creation of a conceptual series of photos, with the game of chess serving as his source of inspiration. A personal sponsor and the enthusiasm expressed by Hans van Manen and Dirk van der Spek—the latter would publish the project as a book—gave him added stimulus to achieve his endeavour. Hans van Manen conceived the project’s title: Chessmen, An Attempt to Play the Game. It can be seen as a reference to Olaf’s debut in the world of staged photography. These days, he no longer limits this form of photography exclusively to his own projects, but also incorporates it in the work he does for others, such as for the employment agency Randstad in 1989, and for the Prins Bernhard Fonds (‘Prince Bernhard Fund’) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary.

As such, the differences between Olaf’s commissioned and autonomous work are minimal. This is anything but unique in an era when advertising and design are so closely intermingled and a renewed appreciation for design as an applied art has emerged. Olaf takes this one step further, turning his advertising work into art as soon as he exhibits it in a museum. Chessmen was a project that Olaf conceived himself, thus limiting himself to a given scheme. The strict format involved thirty-two chess pieces designed as a cohesive whole, posed the same requirements and restrictions customary in his commissioned work. Olaf toyed with black and white on two levels: sixteen white and sixteen black chess pieces, visualised in thirty-two black-and-white photos.

In Chessmen, concepts such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ take on a different meaning. Large, heavy women bound in ropes and tender young boys are all part of a power game photographed from a highly aesthetic perspective, betraying just a tad of the photographer’s own sense of humour. The ‘white bishop’, for instance, is represented by the lower legs of a man with twelve toes—proudly balancing on a calfskin pedestal—tightly wrapped with leather belts and covered in spider webs. Representing the ‘black knight’ is a photo of a bulging, naked woman pulling a cart over a hill with a male herald kneeling in it. The woman’s head is covered with a dark piece of fabric: she dons a headpiece with three long protrusions appearing as phallic symbols. Under his helmet, the herald wears a veil, so his eyes are hidden from view. Neither of the models are looking into the camera. In all of the other photos from Chessmen, the models’ anonymity is preserved, with none turning their gaze in the direction of the camera. The distance between the scene and the observer comes across as intentional. It is not portraits we see, but figures in a theatrical play, acting under the theatrical direction of the chess master, Olaf. In several of the photos, he makes us particularly aware that the world we are dealing with is anything but real: a curtain pulled somewhat to the side is part of the scene, emphasising the representation’s illusionistic character. In doing so, Olaf positions himself in a tradition alongside Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, who employed such devices in order to achieve a trompe l’oeil effect. Other elements in Olaf’s photos likewise refer to seventeenth-century painting. With painters of this era, he shares the same predilection for depicting materials such as textile, feathers, fur, and brassware in the greatest possible detail. He addresses the theme of ‘Vanitas’ through a variety of symbolic attributes: the skull as ‘Memento Mori’; the sword as an inability to defend oneself in the face of death; and flowers to depict the brevity of life. More so than notions of ‘Vanitas’, however, Olaf presents to us the sexual excess of our own twentieth-century Western culture.

The ‘white king’ holds a special place in the Chessmen series: firstly, because it lacks a human model; secondly, because it represents a visual citation, i.e. a reference to the photomontage Niemals Wieder by the Dadaist John Heartfield from 1932. Olaf substituted a white chicken (the king!) for Heartfield’s white dove and published this photo in the Haagse Post as his Christmas message for 1988.

The concept behind Chessmen is that of a refined and intriguing sport, acted out by members of a cruel and violent society. The attributes and poses adopted by Olaf’s models evoke strong associations with the culture surrounding sadomasochism: rope, belts, helmets, whips, masks, and a profusion of leather. He employs the game of chess as a metaphor for the power struggle between people, both in a general and a sexual sense. Photography also serves as a means to release his own feelings of aggression towards the outside world.

Inspired by the death of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Olaf made the photo In Memoriam in 1989, depicting a large black funerary wreath photographed against a black background. The subtle distinction between the black and tonal greys in this image likewise served as the basis for his most recent series entitled Blacks. This project consists of a series of portraits with only black (or black-painted) people in a black setting. The same elements encountered in Chessman are also found in Blacks: classical, strictly arranged compositions, references to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the use of numerous attributes, and a baroque atmosphere.

Both in his commissioned and autonomous work, Olaf often relies on attributes and the external physical characteristics of his models. Actors chosen to embody his ideas are rarely ‘ordinary’ people. He has no desire to ridicule people, nor is it his intention to portray them as ‘oddities’. Instead, he takes advantage of their divergent and bizarre physical traits to convey an alternative kind of reality. Acting as a director, he challenges his models to play along with the (sadomasochistic) attributes he bestows on them. Incorporating these attributes as a source of inspiration, fantasies take shape. It was in this way that a set of horns in a storefront window came to serve as the impetus for the series Chessmen.

Although Olaf has worked on an incidental project in colour, he favours black-and-white photography. He prefers the velvety soft surface of baryta paper to the harder plastic of colour paper, which in his view creates a greater distance. He feels he is more capable of achieving plasticity in his photos through a balanced lighting in black and white and the subtle treatment of gradations in grey.

In technical terms, Olaf can be considered one of the purists when compared to other photographers. He steers and composes from behind the camera, and avoids the temptation to introduce further manipulations at a later stage in the darkroom. The consistent use of a 6×6 cm camera poses continual challenges in finding new compositions within this square format. With the photo Throne, from 1986, he has created a composition new to him—an inverted funnel—which likewise serves as the inspiration for various photos in the series Chessmen. This series and other photos, such as those taken for Randstad and the Prins Bernhard Fonds, affirm Olaf’s eye for detail and his ability to devise well thought-out compositions. Attributes in his photos always play a prominent role in the composition. The balanced distribution of the horizontal and vertical fields is the result of perfect framing.

Most of Olaf’s photos are produced in the studio. He often works with a neutral background, which thus forms a contrast with the theatrical spectacle taking place in the foreground.

Erwin Olaf’s portraits show some agreement with the work of Hans van Manen and Robert Mapplethorpe, though he incorporates a larger number of surrealistic and humoristic details. Van Manen can be viewed as a photographer of the aesthetic male nude; in Mapplethorpe’s work, homoeroticism is the topic at hand, expressed not just aesthetically, but more often chiefly through the controversial way in which he presents it. Both Mapplethorpe and Van Manen were highly influential in Olaf’s development. Their photos have played a part in the acceptance of homoerotic photography. Particularly in his early work, Olaf appears to have turned to Van Manen’s work as a source of inspiration. In his later work, including Chessmen, he presents the (homo-) erotic image in a more direct and shrill manner.

Olaf’s work is even more frequently associated with the photos of Joel Peter Witkin. While there are evident similarities, the two photographers approach their work from two different starting points. Witkin documents and confronts with his photos. He also reworks his negatives in the darkroom. A fascination with people possessing a bizarre outer appearance as a freak of fate and a preoccupation with lifeless nature are what motivates Witkin, who continually seeks out the dark and seamy sides of life. With his camera, he exposes an unknown part of the world. Olaf, by contrast, stages images in order to express his own personal nightmares and emotions. He allows the observer mere glimpses of a dream world—his own personal fantasy that becomes real only for an instant—while at the same time maintaining a certain distance.

With projects like Chessmen and Blacks, Olaf affirms he is a product of his era. His eclectic use of attributes and a multitude of details are entirely in line with the framework of Postmodernism, where citations are also a common feature. No less foreign to Olaf is the individualism of the 1980s. Through his unusual choice of models and subjects, he has established a remarkable position for himself in the world of Dutch photography. In terms of content and style, Olaf’s approach to photography is both highly personal and easily recognisable, evoking responses of enthusiasm and disapproval.

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