Over the coming months, in the run up to the Lürzer’s Archive 40th anniversary, we will celebrate and remember some of the great creatives whose work we have covered and explored, whose interviews have graced our magazine pages and this site.
In doing so, there’s rekindled inspiration and yet sadness, too: we will not all be here for the anniversary.
One of our most cherished interviews was with Erwin Olaf, photographer of some of the most beautiful yet unsettling images of the last 40 years. Sadly, he died after a long illness on 20 September 2023.
Straddling the worlds of fashion, advertising and fine art, he went from documenting the 1980s gay counterculture, to taking the official portraits of the Dutch Royal family in his latter years. He was embraced by the art establishment and the advertising industry equally, and considered a national treasure in his native Holland.
Inspired by the paintings of the old Dutch Masters as much as contemporaries Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Joel-Peter Witkin, his narrative images could never be viewed passively. Often highly-composed, many are pervaded by an uneasy open-endedness, leaving unanswered questions for the viewer to answer themselves.
To pay tribute to this great of European photography, we have gleaned wisdom from a 2009 interview he did with Lürzer's Archive director Lewis Blackwell, and chosen a selection of his iconic work from the Archive.
You can also read his 1996 Lürzer's interview here.
Erwin Olaf in his own words
"At first you have a learning period and have to steal influences and ideas. People say you have to be original but if you torture yourself too much with that you never make anything. You have to try things."
"With film and music, an artist can give you a strong emotion. With photography, there is always a layer of non-emotion between you and the viewer - it is not like being touched in the cinema. This is what I am exploring all the time, because I would love to reach beyond the paper and touch you in the throat and affect you. I think it is nearly impossible with a single photograph. I would love to know how to do this."
"When I do my own work it is more or less my diary; it is what interests me at the time."
"But what is my world? I am not sure; when I start an idea I do not know where I am going to end. Twenty years ago I could - I had a sense of how I wanted it to end. But these days I follow an idea and don't know exactly what I want to explain or tell... The work is open for me too, and I think this is a sign of growing as a person. I am no longer so concerned to convince people; I am not trying to prove something. Nowadays if you don't like it, that's a pity for us both, but I am doing my best and that is it."
I cannot be different from what I am: it has to be what I feel.
"We all have failures. For me, reportage wasn't my strongest point and that now extends to working with dynamic action photography. I can beat myself up about it, but I have to accept that right now I am not the fashion guy with lots of energy crawling around his models."
"Everybody is snapping away doing reportage, or fake reportage, today. If you publish it in the right order it looks OK in the magazine - at first. But I question whether such work will last a few years. There must be about 3.5 billion photographers in the world right now and they can all have a go at reportage. But to be good you have to really understand the craft: there is a lot of craftsmanship to getting a great image."
Where I once had images with twenty clowns and lots or confetti, lots of Photoshop, now I might have one woman with just a little tear in her eye, and it says more. You learn this over time.
The quotes above are from an interview that appeared in Blackwell’s Photowisdom (Chronicle, 2009). With the backing of Erwin Olaf and many other famous photographers, the book helped initiate and support a project with the charity PhotoVoice to teach photographic skills to children in Afghanistan.
Top image: Berlin Clärchens Ballhaus Mitte - 10th of July 2012.
All images by kind permission of Studio Erwin Olaf.
