The life of Erwin Blumenfeld, one of the century's best-known photographers, was by no means conventional. By turns acerbic, self-mocking, playful, even absurd, his autobiography is a compelling, virtuoso account of an extraordinary man. All his subjects--his Jewish family, the Germans, the Vichy French, his models, New York publishers--are dealt equal measures of wit, mockery, and merciless irony. He spares himself least of all. Born in turn-of-the-century Berlin, Blumenfeld was drafted to serve in the First World War, first as an ambulance driver (although he couldn't drive) and then as a bookkeeper in a field brothel, and he was awarded the Iron Cross for giving his sergeant French lessons. Between the wars he was part of an avant-garde circle that included such artists as Else L?asker-Schler, George Grosz, and members of the Dada movement. During the Second World War, Blumenfeld was interned in a series of French camps but eventually arrived in New York, where he found work with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, producing many of their most memorable covers and becoming fashion's highest-paid photographer. From the creator of some of the most striking and influential photographs ever taken, Blumenfeld's autobiography--published here in English for the first time--is a biting and iconoclastic take on the century, and the insightful, gripping story of an exceptional life.

Eye to I: The Autobiography of a Photographer

Biographies & Memoirs

Blumenfeld, Erwin

Arts & Literature

Thames&Hudson

One of the greatest fashion photographers of all time, Erwin Blumenfeld is also recognized as one of the most talented and profoundly erotic portrayers of the nude. He aimed to persuade his audience of the magical beauty of the female form, and to show the world that the nudes of the great master painters--from Botticelli to Ingres--could be challenged by the magical potential of the darkroom. Blumenfeld was an inspired innovator who experimented with solarizations, reticulations, negative-positive combinations, and chemical manipulations to enhance the mystery of his images. The Naked and the Veiled features, in both color and duotone, many photographs never before published, as well as Blumenfeld's famous shots such as Nude under Wet Silk. The text by Yorick Blumenfeld, the photographer's son, provides unusual insights into the work and brings a greater understanding of these highly original and complex images. This book shows the full range of Blumenfeld's astounding inventiveness, from the classic to the surreal to the abstract, from 1930s Amsterdam to 1960s New York. It will interest not only those who are already familiar with Blumenfeld's fashion photographs, but anyone interested in the history of the nude in photography who wishes to see the subject treated by one of the twentieth century's undisputed masters.

The Naked and the Veiled: The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld

Arts & Photography

Blumenfeld, Yorick

Individual Artists

With a career that took him from pre-1914 Berlin to Amsterdam, Paris, and New York, Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was one of the outstanding figures in the history of twentieth-century photography. From the late 1930s to the 1960s, at such influential magazines as Harpers' Bazaar and Vogue, he transformed fashion into high art, and his pictures were in such demand that by the mid-1950s he had become the most highly paid fashion photographer in the world. He photographed the greatest couture creations of the day - designs by Chanel, Balenciaga, Piguet, Dior, and Charles James. Yet his very success in that glamorous world has until now obscured a far more complex and eclectic talent and personality. In Blumenfeld: Photographs, William A. Ewing explores the life and work of this extraordinary and multitalented man. Blumenfeld took up photography almost by chance in the 1920s, beginning with portraiture and the nude. His highly original and visionary work was a seamless blend of the negative and the positive: taking the picture in the studio and making it in the darkroom. Highly inventive, he developed his own idiosyncratic language, using solarization and negative printing, double and multiple exposures, and a host of hybrid techniques. His interests soon expanded to include architectural subjects, landscapes, and works of art, but photographing "Woman" - or capturing the "eternal feminine," as Blumenfeld described it - would remain his chief obsession throughout his life. This book is the first retrospective examination of Blumenfeld's work. It brings together the diverse achievements of this brilliant photographer in more than 235 images in both color and black-and-white, providing a thorough representation of his drawings, collages, and photographs.

Blumenfeld: Photographs : A Passion for Beauty

EWING, William A.

Schinz, Marina

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Meine 100 besten Fotos (German Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Benteli

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