Meeting the Masters at the
6th Annual Lucie Awards, part IV Not yet fifty years old, Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, recipient of the 2008 Lucie Achievement Award in Advertising, has already cut a wide swath through the world of photography, becoming known for his bold, often controversial themes; exuberantly staged and constructed realities, and pointed imagery that addresses issues of beauty, sexuality, individuality, loneliness, and the values and assumptions of our time. Talking with him is both easy and fascinating–he’s literate, knowledgeable, affable, genuine, and articulate. Whatever he undertakes, the results bear the marks of his genius. For Erwin Olaf is brilliantly imaginative, unpredictable, and ever intense, in his humor as well as his compassion. Since 1987, he’s been making films and video as well as photographs. His commercial career began later, taking off in the late 1990s. These days, one can expect Olaf to turn up not only behind a camera (Hasselblad is his favorite), but directing a music video or film or–it’s easy to imagine–undertaking any of a variety of other creative ideas that push the envelope. He’s traveled light years away from the boy who grew up in the small town of Hilverstrum in Holland in the 1950s, where he was bullied by other boys because he “was not like them. Even when I was a child, six or seven, I could not hide that I was gay.” Now, from his base in an old church hall in Amsterdam, the world comes knocking at his door to hire him for global ad campaigns.
Olaf moves easily between personal art projects, which have resulted in scores of exhibitions and distinctions; and commercial assignments, for clients including Kohler and Nintendo, among others. When the New York Times hired him to do a fashion shoot in Paris ( above), he had the set constructed in his Amsterdam studio, disassembled, and reassembled in Paris. The fantastical, surreal, somewhat Fellini-esque images for this shoot depicts models whose fashions and makeup literally entrap them in their surroundings. The first names that came up when I asked Olaf what had drawn him to photography, were in fact filmmakers. “As a young man I went to the cinema where I saw Italian, French, and German movies by Visconti, Fellini, Fassbinder, Pasolini.” Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Piero Pasolini, giants of Italian cinematic neorealism, and Werner Fassbinder of Germany, portrayed in their films many of the issues and themes Olaf would later take up. His works are enriched with the influence of the filmmakers, grafted onto what he took away from his studies in newspaper journalism at the School for Journalism in Utrecht, where he also started photojournalism. Pivotal in his creative growth was meeting Hans van Manen around 1983, “a choreographer and photographer who was friends with Robert Mapplethorpe. Hans’s walls were covered with art–the works of George Platt Lynes, Joel Peter Witkin, Robert Rauschenberg, Mapplethorpe. They were absolutely nothing like what I was doing or the world I had known in school.” One of Olaf’s subsequent black-and-white Mapplethorpe-influenced photographs, of a man holding a bottle of champagne spewing its white froth upward from the front of his torso, sold 500,000 copies. It wasn’t until 1993 that he began to photograph in color, thanks to the emergence of Photoshop. “I used to hate color. But with Photoshop there is so much control possible. I was already too old to learn it when it came. For the first four or five years I always sat next to the post-production guys as they worked. Now I let them play. They bring ideas, you give them ideas, possibilities. Color is important. I may say ‘I don’t like the color of the dress’ and then the color can be changed.”
A watershed in his commercial career came in 1998, when Diesel, the jeans/fashion brand, asked him to create a new worldwide campaign, something darker than what David LaChapelle had done. Olaf’s work featured senior actors in roles that went beyond the expectations of conventional behavior. One of these images, showing a gray-haired woman reaching toward the man sleeping next to her on a sofa (pictured above), won a Silver Lion Award at the Cannes Commercial Festival, where Diesel was honored as Advertiser of the Year. In 2002, Olaf made an international breakthrough in the field of advertising, winning major awards for campaigns done for Heinecken and Nescafe; and creating others shown worldwide for Microsoft, Nokia, Virgin and other clients. At one time the major portion of his work was commercial. But his personal explorations are increasingly important to him, and now the ratio is approaching fifty-fifty. He views both sides of his career as complementary, though he acknowledges his emotional growth may come most with his personal work. His 2003 Separation series is a case in point. The work is very dark tonally, blacks and deep blues. “In it a mother and a son wear rubber suits. In this I’m using the rubber fetish as a metaphor for loneliness. Wearing these you can touch but you are not any closer. I displayed the photographs in my studio, seven or eight pictures. I was very touched. I began to cry, cry. I realized this was the last of the anger and frustration of my own youth. You can feel it going. After this the aggression was gone and things were completely changed. After that came “Rain,” “Hope,” “Grief,” “Fall.” But it took ‘Separation,’ the first interiors, to step into anger. Then I could move on.” A vigorous, charged dark palette is used for different emotional impact in “New Warriors,” Edwin Van der Sar, goalkeeper, Dutch National Football Team, 2008, commissioned portraits of the Dutch National Football Team (the sport called soccer in the U.S.-pictured below).
Other photographers bridge fine art and commercial work, but there are few who achieve parallel acclaim for both on an international scale. In 2008, the Lucie tribute to Olaf’s commercial work came nearly lockstep with the publication of his Aperture monograph, Erwin Olaf. This beautifully produced 10x13-inch hardcover, enhanced with a tip-in full-color portrait, features three of Olaf’s most heralded bodies of personal work: “Rain” (2004), “Hope” (2005), and “Grief” (2007). The cover image, of an expressionless, pretty young woman standing in front of an apartment door (below), is characteristic of the images to follow throughout the book. In each, Olaf has set the stage completely, creating the set, selecting the clothing, hiring the talent, and supervising the Photoshop work on the final image, to make sure it is exactly what he wants. But it’s left to the viewer to move further inside the photograph once the emotion takes hold. “I like to give the viewer the suggestion and let you fill in your own fantasy. The series takes you by the hand.”
The cover portrait, “Hope Portrait #5,” (pictured) presumably is meant to suggest hope. Where does it take us? Though the woman wears a yellow dress suitable for a party, there are no clues to tell us if she’s been stood up or if she has left the party inside for a breather. She has one hand resting on her shoulder, and the other on the wall. She’s hanging on. Okay, now we can start spinning a story. In this regard, we’re no different from Olaf when he’s working on a project: “Even as a maker, a creator, you don’t know where you’re going, you cannot predict any more where it’s taking you.” It’s the journey that matters, and the empathy we feel when drawn into hidden realities and “characters caught between action and reaction.”
“The Kitchen,” another from the Hope series (pictured above), depicts a woman seated alone, gazing downward. “One of my key images is a woman seated at a table, on the table is a plate with a cake on it that has a piece missing. This shows my love for composition, a clean kind of fantasy, also the way her hands are, her feet, her face–at the same time I make a joke. I had to decide where to put that cake, on her lap, in her hand, but the table was the right place. Maybe she could be thinking, ‘From now on I’m not going to have another piece.’ She is going to lose weight. Perhaps.” When Olaf began the “Rain” series he had planned it to be in the upbeat spirit of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post. “But in this work I am exploring my own feelings too, and when I began to photograph I didn’t feel happiness.” To entice the reader in for an intimate look, many of the sixty-five color plates nearly fill a page or a two-page spread. The layout and design direct your full attention to the images: there are no page numbers, no section breaks, no captions or titles to distract. However, the components let you have an interactive experience–if you want to better explore the relationships between and among the images. First, there are the plates (photographs) which one might assume would be divided into three discrete sections (Hope, Rain, Grief). Wrong. Images from all three series run throughout. Second, a DVD is included, with excerpts from five short videos, in which some of the same people depicted in the photographs appear. Third is your map to the book: thumbnails of the plates with page numbers and full information on the photographs and their source. Fourth, Alasdair Foster’s essay, “The Mystery of the Visible,” offers fascinating background about Olaf’s career and the sources and ideas behind the work in Erwin Olaf. A résumé tops it off. If this book interests you at all, my recommendation is buy it now, for yourself or as a gift, because the first edition is sure to go out of print soon. It retails at $65.00 U.S. Erwin Olaf lives in Amsterdam. He is represented exclusively in the United States by Hasted Hunt of New York City. The works in Erwin Olaf are Lambda prints, made in limited editions in two sizes, approximately 28" x 40" and 47" x 67." Hasted Hunt sold out the last edition of “Hope Portrait #5" at the 2008 Annual AIPAD Exhibition in New York City, for $25,000. Contact Hasted Hunt: info@hastedhunt.com Contact the Lucies at www.lucieawards.com. Mary Ann Lynch has written about popular culture, the arts, and all things photographic for a number of publications including: Camera Arts, the Honolulu Advertiser, Imago, National Geographic Travel New York, Shots, and View Camera. Her photography exhibit, “Marilyn Monroe: More Than You Know” can be seen online at www.tccphotogallery.com
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© Red Dog Journal, 2008 |