The Naked And The Veiled
Saturday, November 08, 2014
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| Paris - 1937, 38 |
As we progress into
this century in my field of photography I have found that there are few
photographers left from that old guard (as I call it) who had or have an
identifiable style.
One of my faves was
German fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, 1897 –1969. Perhaps he is not as
famous as Helmut Newton or others who shot nudes. Perhaps it is because
Blumenfeld’s photographs were more internal and any eroticism was subtle.
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| Self-portrait, Zandvoort, Holland c.1930 |
I have a fondness for
his book The Naked and the Veiled – The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld
because the author is his son Yorick Blumenfeld who writes beautifully on how
his father was motivated to take those elegant b+w (and colour) nudes that
involve veils, mirrors and distortion.
Of his veiled nudes
his son writes:
He claimed that his enduring obsession with
transparency and veils was born when at age nine, he was taken by a governess
to visit the studio of a Berlin
painter. The model surprised by their entrance, quickly threw a diaphanous
cloth over herself. But the outline of her body was still visible against the
light. Later in his teenage years, the thin suggestive veils employed by such
admired painters as Memling, Cranach and Botticelli made Blumenfeld realize
that the naked woman could become ‘even more naked by their transparent veils.’
I found this
interesting too:
The sleazy romanticism
of the Berlin
garment industry, in which Blumenfeld was forced to work after his father had
died of tertiary syphilis in 1913, held no appeal to him. In his autobiography,
he describes the furtive trysts of his bosses in voyeuristic detail. From his
experiences in ladies’ fashion, however, he learned to distinguish between
fabrics, and discovered the ways in which a woman’s form changed under silk,
tulle, muslin and gauze. This knowledge would reveal itself later in the
intensity of his focus on the quality of fabric in his fashion photographs, as
well as his nude studies, such as his famous Nude under Wet Silk (1938).
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| Danielle c.2001 - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
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| Danielle - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
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| Danielle - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
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| Danielle - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
