Erwin Olaf is probably Holland's best-known photographer. Exhibitions of his work tend to draw record crowds, and his contributions to the Dutch new magazine Vrij Nederland have already made two issues of the weekly immediate sell-outs. In 1989, he was awarded first prize in the Young European Photographers competition.
The 36-year-old’s photographs can now be found in museums and exhibitions alongside those of synch seminal figures of art photography as Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe, who - due to similar themes and a certain penchant for the provocative - Olaf occasionally gets compared to.
In fact, the differences between Olaf and Mapplethorpe, with his rigid, almost hysterical, aestheticizing of taboo-laden subjects, outweigh any similarities. Impossible to imagine Mapplethorpe could have given the title “Joy” to a retrospective of his work, as Olaf did in 1993. And when it comes to commercial or advertising photography, there are also significant differences. While Mapplethorpe’s attitude towards advertising photography in his few ill-fated outings was uneasy at best, Olaf - his junior by a decisive generation - knows no such qualms. Describing Olaf’s selection of images that were exhibited at his retrospective, Peter Weiermair, Director of the Frankfurt Kunstverein, writes, “... deliberately, no distinction is made between personal and commissioned work, between his fashion and advertising photography … they all bear the ineligible stamp of the artist; in the presence of the works - whether observed or staged realities - the boundaries blur.” In recent years Olaf has also made a name for himself as the director of short films and several highly-successful pop promos for Dutch singers Mathilde Santing and Karin Bloemen.
Michael Weinzetti spoke to the wanderer between the various worlds of photography and filmmaking in Amsterdam, shortly after Olaf’s return from Australia where he had his first solo show south of the equator.
Erwin Olaf is probably Holland's best-known photographer. Exhibitions of his work tend to draw record crowds, and his contributions to the Dutch new magazine Vrij Nederland have already made two issues of the weekly immediate sell-outs. In 1989, he was awarded first prize in the Young European Photographers competition.
The 36-year-old’s photographs can now be found in museums and exhibitions alongside those of synch seminal figures of art photography as Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe, who - due to similar themes and a certain penchant for the provocative - Olaf occasionally gets compared to.
In fact, the differences between Olaf and Mapplethorpe, with his rigid, almost hysterical, aestheticizing of taboo-laden subjects, outweigh any similarities. Impossible to imagine Mapplethorpe could have given the title “Joy” to a retrospective of his work, as Olaf did in 1993. And when it comes to commercial or advertising photography, there are also significant differences. While Mapplethorpe’s attitude towards advertising photography in his few ill-fated outings was uneasy at best, Olaf - his junior by a decisive generation - knows no such qualms. Describing Olaf’s selection of images that were exhibited at his retrospective, Peter Weiermair, Director of the Frankfurt Kunstverein, writes, “... deliberately, no distinction is made between personal and commissioned work, between his fashion and advertising photography … they all bear the ineligible stamp of the artist; in the presence of the works - whether observed or staged realities - the boundaries blur.” In recent years Olaf has also made a name for himself as the director of short films and several highly-successful pop promos for Dutch singers Mathilde Santing and Karin Bloemen.
Michael Weinzetti spoke to the wanderer between the various worlds of photography and filmmaking in Amsterdam, shortly after Olaf’s return from Australia where he had his first solo show south of the equator.
L[A]Let’s talk about your advertising work first. What kind of experiences have you had so far?
EOWell it’s strange, you know, because it almost seems I can divide the experiences I’ve made with advertising photography along the lines of whether I worked with the client direct or whether an advertising agency was involved. Usually , when I worked with the client direct, like I did for the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who commissioned me to shoot posters for his feature films, everything worked out fine. With agencies, sometimes I feel there are too many people involved and the requirements they have are not clear, the briefing they give you keeps changing and in the end they reject your work for the very same reasons they hired you initially.
The most blatant example of this may be something I was commissioned to do for Coca-Cola. Now, you may have seen these Magnum ice cream posters, the close-ups of the woman’s lips licking the Magnum bar. These posters are really everywhere here in Holland and get a lot of attention. So Coca-Cola’s agency, an alternative agency, also wanted something “sexy” like that, for although Coco-Cola has a lot of posters out there too, people always notice the Magnum stuff first. So they came up with this idea a poster that is basically a very traditional Coke image, you know the pretty girl drinking the product, pouring Coke into her mouth. It was just supposed to be more sexy this time, a kind of 50s styling but a more sexy feel to it. I loved it because it was the first time I worked with the computer. It was a lot of work and a huge budget and I really enjoyed working on it, enjoyed the experience. I felt that if you put something like that on the streets no one would even notice Magnum anymore. But when it was finished, they rejected it, the American office rejected it because they felt it was too sexy! And then, later, you saw what they did instead, quick, quick, quick. There was this 17-year-old girl with curly hair, and she was styled in this 1989 way, very dated, not at all an image for 1996. And you saw this poster in one or two places and then it was gone, never to return. So this whole thing cost an enormous amount of money and it had no effect whatsoever. Except that Coca-Cola went back to their old agency. But for me this experience was typical of working with agencies where there are so many people involved who all try to have their say, and what the client thinks is another matter altogether.
L[A]Your project for the designer Borek Šípek created quite a stir. How did that come about?
EOBorek Šípek had seen my book “Chessmen”, in which I reinterpreted the 32 figure of chess rather extravagantly, with lots of props and fantastic medieval-type costumes and he wanted something like that for a catalog which would present the very expensive “objets d’art” which he is famous for. And he called me and said, “I’ve got this house in Friesland and we could go there and get some models and do the pictures there.” And he wanted to dress up the models like gypsies since this is where his origins are. And I felt, what a racist idea! So I suggested to him, why not go to where real gypsies live today, a place like Slovakia and use genuine gypsies for the pictures? And he was quite taken by the idea. Which is why we went to Slovakia and found these gypsies, talked to them, to make sure they really understood what this was all about. This is really important to me, you know, to not just use people but to work with them, with them clearly knowing what they are doing in front of the camera. So in these pictures you see these people who live in very poor conditions holding these vases and other objects, where one piece is about five thousand marks. I like the criticism implicit in all this on the type of consumerism rampant only a thousand miles to the West.
L[A]Didn’t the designer object to this?
EOOh no. It’s funny but Borek Šípek himself cannot quite believe the prices that are asked for his objects. He comes from a modest background himself and has been designing these things all of his life and then suddenly they become all the rage and the asking prices skyrocketed. But it's the same with many people who suddenly become famous for something they have done all of their lives. Most successful people I have met were surprised by their success. They found it somewhat abnormal.
Now I wouldn't call myself that successful but on that boring long plane trip back from Australia I started to calculate how many people had seen my work in the past year, and I did not count those who've got in contact with it through my books. But I had exhibitions in Erlangen, Frankfurt, New York, Sydney and Amsterdam. And I arrived at a number way above 100,000. And this never ceases to amaze me.
L[A] Your free projects have all been very diverse. How did you come up with the ideas for them?
EOWell, with the “Chessmen” book, which came out in 1988 and for which I was awarded first prize in the young European Photographer Competition, I got the inspiration through listening to a weekly program on the game of chess. You see, chess is a very aggressive game. And I am a very aggressive person in a way, in Holland the term “the aggressive camera of Erwin Olaf” has become a journalistic cliché. Journalists have been using that expression again and again ever since the first feature on me appeared in the press.
It's even worked a bit against me in so far that I often hear from advertising people that I am too much there in the photographs I do. and that one could tell immediately if a photograph was by me, which I sincerely doubt considering the many different things I've done over the years. Ayway, Chessman started out with something I heard on the radio and then I saw these horns in a shop window, saw a theater performance where they use all these fantastic helmets, and in the end it all came together in my head.
I have a fascination with certain materials and the way they look in photographs, rope, for example. What does a material do when it is used in black and white photography? What does fur do? When you came in I immediately looked at your leather waistcoat, because that would be a nice material to take a black and white picture of. How can I photograph black on black, which was the main reason for doing my “Blacks" series. So there is this fascination with some technical aspects of photography and then there comes some unifying idea for a theme that sometimes comes unexpectedly.
My “Ten Tables” series grew out of a photograph I was commissioned to do in 1989 by the Randstad temps work agency. They asked 5 photographers to interpret the theme of work. And I put this old woman who I knew very well and who had worked all of her life - she was one of my favorite models - on a table so it looked like she was standing on a pedestal. I called the photograph “Working Class Heroine” and this got me fascinated with the idea of putting normal people on some kind of pedestal, and so this series of absurdist image developed out of this first image.
With “Blacks”, the Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art called and offered me a room to show some new work, and till about four months before the deadline I couldn't think of anything. And then one night I was watching TV, and a friend of mine, who does the art direction for all the Greenaway films, was being interviewed. And he was wearing black from head to toe, even black glasses. Afterwards I took a shower. I put on a record, it was Janet Jackson’s “Control”, where she sings “In complete darkness we’re all the same, it’s only our knowledge and wisdom that separate us. Don’t let your eyes deceive you”. And I listened to that while taking the shower. Before I got into the shower I had smoked a joint. And suddenly I had this idea of doing a whole series of some kind of “royal” portraits with all the people in black make-up and wardrobe.
I dashed out of the shower and called up a friend and described the idea to him and said, “What do you think of this idea? Is it good or is it a shitty one? I can’t really tell because I’m so stoned”. And he said, yes, it’s a good idea, and so I embarked on this incredible production on which I worked for three months but which was sparked by this sudden flash of inspiration.
L[A]Last year you did a series of color portraits of mentally challenged people. What got you interested in doing this?
EOThis, as opposed to the “Blacks” project is not something that I thought of all of a sudden. Much rather, this goes back to one of the earliest assignments I was given while studying journalism in Utrecht. It was in 1978, when my teacher Dirk van der Spel sent me to an institute for the mentally handicapped to record how fine the dividing line can be between what’s considered “normal” and “not normal”. I returned to this theme last year to do my series “Mind of Their Own”, which portrays mostly children with Down’s Syndrome. While all I had the first time around was a borrowed camera with which I took some black and white photos, this time I tried to recapture the spirit in the formal portraits of painters such as Frans Hals and Rembrandt, and shot them as some kind of lush passport photos against the background of the colour of rubies, sapphires and emeralds. To break the illusion of perfection usually associated with commercial art, I scratched the negative and burned them with a naked flame. The film then warps and splits, and the colors start bubbling and melting. Everytime a print is made the negative is further damned so that each piece is unique.
L[A]How did the children and their parents react?
EOOh, they loved it, particularly the children. Of course we had intensive talks with the parents, the children and with various staff at mental institutions. Again, I wanted to make sure that they understood what I was trying to do. Apart from the fact that we paid them semi-professional model rates, we hired professional beauticians to transform the children, a dresser worked on the luxurious cushions and pearls. These kids really adored all the special attention. And they were very pleased with the finished portraits. One of the subject’s parents told me that their little daughter, Saskia, was so amazed to see herself as a model in a larger-than-life photograph that she has become much more lively and is doing much better at school. Not that this is possibly therapeutic effect of the project had anything to do with what I was intentionally trying to do, but it is nice to learn of these “spin offs”.
L[A]Since 1990 you have also been very active in film. You have made some extremely successful video promos. I read that one for Mathilde Santing had to be repeatedly shown on TV because so many viewers called up and requested to see it again. Would you like to work more in this medium?
EOOh yes. I have always been fascinated by the moving image and my working experience with films which includes several shot films, video promos and TV specials has been a very good one. In June I’m directing a commercial for the NVSH, a Dutch association for sexual counseling, which will feature four women, and their bodies are to be treated like landscapes. I got this assignment on the basis of my video promo for Karin Bloemen, who is really big here in Holland. She calls herself “La Blomen”. And she is not only big in terms of popularity, she is also physically big.
https://youtu.be/W_iqVLUAoro?feature=shared
Karin Bloemenmusic video by Erwin Olaf
I filmed her in the shower, at one point you see her throwing off her fur coat and stepping naked into the shower shower stall. This video caused quite a sensation here in Holland, and this commercial I’m going to do next is a result of this. But of course, here I go again being typecast as someone who films fat women. What I really would like to do later on is funny colorful stuff for kids, you know like commercial for peanut butter and things like that. But I see this upcoming commercial also as a kind of tryout because they don’t really know me so well in this world of commercial filmmaking. They probably still think I’m some kind of freak, who doesn’t know how to work with a budget, who smokes joints on the set, etc. They don’t know that there was practically no budget on the Mathilde Santing video or the other stuff I’ve done and that the great result we got was due to our great team, the production people, the cameraman, certainly not because of money because budget-wise the whole thing was just low, low, low.
L[A]What made you decide to take steps towards the medium of film in the first place?
EOWell, I have done black and white photography and I’ve done color photography, I’ve also experimented with computers and I could go on and on. But I like to discover new things. I hate to do the same things over and over again, especially if everybody else starts doing it too. You know, like the male nude. When I stayed out doing male nudes in 1985, there weren’t that many people doing these things. There was Mapplethorpe of course, there was Hand van Manen, who’s a friend of mine, and a few others, but it was still considered avant garde, very new.
But nowadays male nudity has become a boring cliché. You see it everywhere, especially in commercial photography. Nowadays, in commercial photography you have a naked girl and a naked boy. Ten years ago it was only naked women selling the products. So I’m trying to do new things. I’m much more interested in the aspect of communicating now. Doing new things is really where my motivation comes from. This can be one of the problems with commercial photography. Of course I have lots of friends who do nothing by advertising photography. ANd they always complain to me about having to do the same stuff over and over again. There is this trap awaiting all of us. We all start out as artists. We come from school and then we get an assignment and, boy, do we get excited about it. But before you know if you do the same thing every day, For some it is jeans, jeans, jeans. They work with the same models, the same people all the time. I couldn’t do that. I want to change, want to do different things. Of course it is mainly and economic question. I have a house I have to make payments on and I have a cat to feed. I have two people working for me part-time and the studio, which is really nothing compared to what most photographers have. But how much do you really need? Do you really need that big car, the mobile phone, the huge studio if it mans that you become dependent on having to produce a large amount of paid-for work? And so stand in the way of your own development? Then they come to me and say how much they envy my creative freedom. “Well, you can have it,” they say “you with your art photography”. And I always think to myself “Well, you could do it too, if you really wanted”. On the other end of the spectrum you have these purely conceptual photographers like my friend Rineke Dijkstra, or people like Andres Serrano who are really art-art. And in that world many photographers feel that any kind of assignment would cheapen their creativity. But that’s the art world, and the art world is just as phony and terrible as the advertising world. So I’m happy to to be between all worlds. Then, of course, there is also the would of fashion photography, part also of the commercial would and something I don’t get at all. Fashion photography is all about creative atmosphere without showing anything.
L[A]What do you mean, you don’t show anything?
EOWell, if you look at some of the Calvin Klein ads, for Eternity, you see only the face of a man, and his hair has been groomed for $800 a day, and he’s just looking into the camera, and that’s all. He’s rather badly photographed, I might add, just like this Kate Moss poster for Obsession, where she’s lying on a couch with the lighting really not very beautiful. To me, all this fashion photography is really nothing photography. The only time you see dresses is when you look at cat walk photography. Otherwise, it’s usually just an out-of-focus blur.
L[A]So fashion photography is something you would never attempt?
EONo, actually I would love to do it. But only if they let me focus. I hate it when pictures are out of focus, however trendy this may be at a certain time. For some time it was all the rage to show just the face of the model in focus and then have the dress in a kind of mist. And this is just something I’m not capable of, this is just not in my blood, it goes completely against my aesthetic beliefs. But then, I wou;dn’t rule out doing any kind of photography. For me there really isn’t much distinction between any kind of photograph. There is just good and bad photography. When I was in New York for the openjing of my show I also looked around and was struck by the bad advertising photography everwhere - quite the opposite of the way of what I see in London. All this boring Calvin Klein stuff with the white background and the flat light. I’m not talking about this tennie-porn campaign, which is great. I almost hate it because it’s so good. I wish I’d thought of that first. Not much else. But the stuff I saw in the art galleries wasn’t great either although some of these galliereis seem to be doing really good business. I was in this one gallery and it was beautiful. They had six people working there at computers and typewriters and I thought to myself this must cost a fortune to run. And they had an exhibition of work by Lynn Davis.
L[A]The former associate of Robert Mapplethorpe?
EORight, which is what got her to the place she is now. I think she does really, really bad stuff, really bad quality stuff. And yet she is selling like hot cakes. She exhibited these photographs of pyramids and buddha dances. You know, three pictures of pyramids in a row, in the first you see the pyramid a little bit from the left, in the next you see it from the front, and the last shows the pyramid a little bit from the right, etc. $20,000 for these three photos. And even the prints were awful, kind of grayish. Yet this stuff sells. We were just flabbergasted. It took me several weeks to figure out why this really shoddy works is so successful. I think it’s because these rich people who can afford these kind of pictures buy them because they don’t like to say anything about their personalities. If they bought one of my photos, let’s say a male nude, and hung it on the wall, this would amount to a personal statement about themselves. It would mean that they like the boy in the picture, or whatever. And when the boss is coming over for dinner or your mother-in-law, also with three million in the bank account, who you still own 2,000,000 to… you see all these things count, so many of the people with the money prefer to go in for some of these abstract decorative things that don’t reveal anything about themselves, yet are pricey and prestigious.
It’s the same with Mapplethorpe. It’s his flower pictures that sold when he was still alive, not his other stuff. I don’t sell a whole lot, even though so many people come to my shows - there were 2,500 alone at the opening in Sydney. But you see, people who like my pictures are mostly between the ages of 18 and 35 but that’s an age group that cannot really afford to buy. It’s the older segment that buys. But this Lynn Davis stuff really irritated me. There is nothing new about any of it. We have seen a thousand pictures of pyramids, also better ones, and when you as a photographer cannot add anything to a subject, why bother? And the gallery owner kept gabbing about “the magical power of these things Lynn saw on her travels, blah blah blah”, So what we saw were just blown-up holiday snaps, That’s what they looked like to me. On the other hand, when you look at some advertising photographs, they are really art. I’m thinking of things like the Silk Cut ads, the photography there is so beautiful - like the one with the scissors that form a Tuscan landscape…
L[A]That was done by Nadav Kander…
EOBeautiful, If you cut off the health warning you could easily hang this on the wall as a piece of art. So sometimes you can find more “art” in advertising than in a lot of this so-called art photography.
Erwin Olaf died after a long illness on 20 September 2023. Read our tribute to him here.
You are approaching your free content limit
1
2
3
You have reached your free content limit…Become a member for unlimited access to luerzersarchive.com
