The man who photographed beautiful women

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Modern technology allows a stunning view of the work of a great 20th-century fashion photographer

Erwin Blumenfeld – Studio Blumenfeld: Color New York 1941–1960 by Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit and François Cheval

In starting a sitting,  first I must have an idea of what I'm trying to do.  Many times the first exposure I make is far away from my goal; the second better and so on throughout the whole until the last negative – there is the picture!  If it takes six exposures to reach this point, I make six exposures.  It is takes twenty, twenty I make. But I always keep working up to the climax of what I visualized in the first place.  Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.  Although he came late to the profession – he was in his early 40s when he finally took it up as a career – he revolutionized the world of fashion photography and set the standards still adhered to today.

The most prolific period of his 35-year career was his time in New York where he worked for the major magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life. This period was the subject of an illuminating exhibition at Somerset House earlier this year, ‘Blumenfeld Studio: New York 1941–1960’.   

Blumenthal produced an extensive body of work throughout his career but it was the USA after the war, with a growing economy and a buoyant, expanding press, that gave him the opportunity to flourish.  Some of his Vogue covers are still, 60 years later, among the most iconic fashion images ever.

This book, written to accompany the exhibition, celebrates the output from his Central Park studio – his fashion photography, advertising campaigns, personality portraits, 'war effort' propaganda posters, and experimental work, which have since been recognized as technical achievements in the field.  It features over 90 original modern prints, fully restored in colour, and original publication clippings, and stills from rarely seen fashion films from the early 1960s.

The images are beautiful – glamorous images of perfectly made up, coiffured, styled women. It is a feat of modern technology that so much of Blumenfeld's work can be shown, as no colour photographic prints exist from the his Studio.  In the Blumenfeld archive there are two types of colour photograph, the original transparency film 'positives', and vintage published material, such as magazine covers, features and adverts, made from these.

Handling, time, heat and light, have all damaged Blumenfeld's Kodachrome and Ektachrome transparencies of the 1940s and ’50s, and the prints shown were made using the published material in the archive as a guide towards the original tonality of the transparencies. The process of colour 'reconstruction' was undertaken digitally with minimal intervention in order to reveal Blumenfeld's original treatment of colour.

Born in Berlin in 1897 to a Jewish bourgeois family, Blumenfeld worked as an apprentice in the garment industry before serving as a soldier in France in the First World War. In 1918 a move to Amsterdam, where he opened a leather goods shop, signalled change. He moved in Dadaist circles, proclaiming himself head of the Dutch Dada movement under the pseudonym of Jan Bloomfield. Frustrated by life as a shopkeeper, he drew, painted and made collages.  Then in 1932 his discovery of a darkroom at the back of the shop inspired him to take up photography, and the women who came into the shop became the subjects of his experiments in portraiture.

When his business went bankrupt he left for Paris in 1935.  With a dream of becoming a fashion photographer he settled in Montparnasse where he mixed with the artistic and intellectual avant-garde.  He took on advertising contracts and his photographs were published in various French magazines. 

As was the case for many photographers at the time, nudes became his preferred subject.  Admitting to a ‘platonic erotomania’, Blumenfeld used women's bodies to experiment with photographic techniques: he drew out, compressed, veiled, filtered, solarized, using visual and chemical effects in his search for a new aesthetic. In doing so he established the formulas he would reinterpret throughout his career.

Then in 1937 he met the English photographer Cecil Beaton, who introduced him to French Vogue magazine, but his hopes of becoming a fashion photographer in France were dashed when war broke out in 1939 and he was interned in detention camps. 

In 1941 Blumenfeld escaped to America with his family and settled in New York, where he was immediately signed up by Harper's Bazaar, collaborating with the editor, Carmel Snow, and fashion editor, Diana Vreeland, on the magazine's fashion shoots.  After only three years working in the USA he became one of the most famous and highly paid photographers in the business, with the New York Times heralding him as an ‘outstanding leader in imaginative photography’.   His dream had at last come true at the age of 44.

Then began what was to become the highlight of his career: a 15-year collaboration with Vogue and its art director, Alexander Liberman, during which he shot over 50 US Vogue covers, including portraits of famous models and high-society women of the day such as Babe Paley, Dovima, Jean Patchett and Carmen Dell'Orefice.

Fashion photography was by now booming and Blumenfeld's highly inventive style was much in demand from other American fashion magazines including Cosmopolitan (for which he shot Grace Kelly in 1955), and Life Magazine, as well as international fashion and beauty companies such as Dior, Elizabeth Arden, Max Factor, L'Oreal, and Helena Rubinstein, for whom he shot major advertising campaigns.

Blumenfeld saw photography as art, and wished to be respected as an avant-garde artist rather than a fashion photographer.  Blumenfeld frequently drew inspiration from art history, as shown in his modern twist on Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring for USVogue, and Manet's Bar des Folies Bergeres for a Harper's Bazaar shoot in 1941.

Ignoring the conventional codes of photography Blumenfeld developed his own idiosyncratic style and revolutionized how a fashion photograph was taken.  He was the first photographer to produce an image incorporating the white space around the subject – something accepted as the norm today but a technique untried before he invented it. He ushered in a new age of photography and was much sought after by movie stars, including Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Lucille Ball and Audrey Hepburn.

Blumenfeld's new-found position as a studio professional in New York was very different from his commercial experience in Europe. Subject to contracts and objectives, it was another way of making photographs all together. A sitting now required between 10 and 40 different exposures in 8x10inch format, a subtle distribution of lighting, make-up, staging and accessories, all of which he personally oversaw. 

The final images used for publication were often cropped, their colours altered, the orientations flipped, everything he sought to guard against in attempting to control the whole chain of photographic production, from shooting to printing.  Nonetheless, his good relations with Alexander Liberman resulted in Vogue covers of undisputable graphic beauty, and layouts, although often audacious, that were respectful of the photographs.

The transparencies held in Blumenfeld's archives, however, show his working practices within the studio.  Not selected for publication, they are 'raw images' without any retouching or intervention by the art director or engraver.  Seeing the two side by side yields a fascinating insight into the entire photographic process from Blumenfeld's original vision to the finished published image. 

Blumenfeld continued to work in fashion and advertising until the early 1960s.  He died in Rome in 1969 at the age of 72.

People really want quality and beauty.  It is up to the photographer to give it to them, even if it has to be smuggled into the illustration when no one is looking.Erwin Blumenfeld, 1948.

Erwin Blumenfeld – Studio Blumenfeld: Color New York 1941–1960 by Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit and François Cheval is published by Steidl, 2013. 208 pp.Fully illustrated, £24.00. ISBN978-3869305318