Gordon Coster

The Photography of Gordon Coster

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1906, Gordon H. Coster was an American photographer known for his abstracted industrial images and his photojournalism documenting civil rights and labor issues. Interested in photography from an early age, he joined the Baltimore Camera Club in the early 1920s and garnered a reputation when his modernistic images were accepted in international photographic salons. At nineteen years old, Coster’s 1925 Bauhaus-inspired image of Baltimore’s Washington Monument, “Shadow of the Washington Monument”, was published in the Baltimore Sun’s rotogravure section.

From 1920 to 1925, Gordon Coster worked for the Bachrach Portrait Studio in Baltimore. Once photography replaced drawing in advertising illustration, he moved to New York City where he became employed by the prestigious Underwood & Underwood. Originally the largest producer and distributor of stereoscopic and other photographic images, the photographic studio became a pioneer in the field of news bureau photography. Coster secured his place in the field by creating innovative advertising and industrial photo-illustrations for newspapers, magazines and catalogues.

From the beginning of 1927 through 1936, Coster documented labor union activities. He relocated to Chicago in 1930 where he founded a mid-western branch of Underwood & Underwood. During his years in Chicago, Coster developed an unique artistic style for his evening cityscapes. These experimental works presented an abstracted perspective of Chicago’s buildings, shot with tilted angles and occasionally through unfocused lenses. Coster shifted his career to photojournalism with freelance work for such periodicals as Life, Scientific American, Time, Fortune, and Holiday.

Gordon Coster’s personal commitment to the welfare of his fellow citizens led to many extensive documentary projects. In the late 1930s, he produced many projects dedicated to American life in the mid-west. Coster created a series on the lives of wheat farmers and a detailed photo-documentary on the Tennessee Valley Authority Dam Project. Passed in 1933, the TVA project, though controversial at the time, transformed the wild Tennessee Valley river system into a stable region with flood-control, safe navigation, electrification, and economic development. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Coster documented the impact of World War II on the U.S. home front through images of factories repurposed for military production, women assembly-line workers, and rallies to support the troops.

In 1946 Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, who founded the Chicago Institute of Design, invited Coster to lecture at the institute’s course “The New Vision in Photography” alongside such eminent photographers as Paul Strand, Erwin Blumenfeld and Berenice Abbott. Coster returned to lecture in 1950 to 1951 and later in 1960 with a focus on socially-oriented themes. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected Coster’s work for inclusion in the landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

Gordon Coster ceased his photographic work in 1964 and eventually retired in 1982. He passed away in 1988 at the age of sixty-two. Coster’s work has been included in exhibitions at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, London’s Viewfinder Gallery, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: Gordon Coster’s photographic work is included in the current 2023 exhibition “Trick Photography and Visual Effects” (January 19 to March 18) at the Keith de Lellis Gallery located at 41 East 57th Street in New York City.

A major collection of Gordon Coster’s work, including over twenty-five thousand prints, negatives, transparencies, and film reels, is housed at the Research Center of the Chicago History Museum.

Top Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Self Portrait”, circa 1945, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Eliot Elisofon”, 1942, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Cover July 13, 1942, International Center of Photography

Bottom Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Chicago Outdoor Street Market”, 1944, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Collection, 33.7 x 26.7 cm, International Center of Photography

John Dall: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, 1948, Publicity Shot for Universal International, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in New York City in May of 1920, John Dall Thompson was an American stage and film actor. The younger of two sons born to Charles Thompson and Henny Worthington, he moved with his family in the 1920s to Panama, where his father was employed as a civil engineer for airport construction. After performing at a local theater, Dall first gave thought to the possibility of acting as a career. Due to the death of Charles Thompson by suicide in 1929, the family chose to return to New York City.

John Dall attended the Horace Mann School, a private college-preparatory school in the Bronx, and enrolled at Columbia University with the intention of studying engineering. He soon left the university and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Theodore Irvine School of Theater. Dall also took theater courses in New Orleans at the Petit Theatre, a historic French Quarter playhouse founded in 1916.

Dall performed for six years in various stock companies, primarily the Children’s Theater founded in New York City in 1924 by British actress and playwright Clare Tree Major. He also worked in several theater companies headed by such performers as Academy Award winner Aline MacMahon, actor Arthur William Byron, and stage and screen actress Edith Atwater. During the 1941-1942 season, Dall had small roles on Broadway which included the 1920 science-fiction play “R.U.R.” by Czech writer Karel Čapek. In 1942-1943, Dall had the lead role of Quizz Martin in the touring production of Maxwell Anderson’s “The Eve of St Mark” which later moved to Broadway.

John Dall’s performance in the Broadway version of “The Eve of St Mark” caught the attention of the wife of Jack Warner, founder of Warner Brothers Pictures. This resulted in a film contract with the studio; a proviso was added to the contract that allowed Dall personal time for stage performances. Dall’s first film with Warner Brothers was director Irving Rapper’s 1945 “The Corn is Green”, a drama starring Bette Davis as a schoolteacher bringing education to a Welsh coal mining town. Dall played the lead role of miner Morgan Evans and was nominated for the 1946 Academy Award / Best Supporting Actor.

Impressed with the film rushes for “The Corn is Green”, Warner Brothers signed Dall to a new contract. He became one of the studio’s six contract players that were to be built into stars; the others included Lauren Bacall, Dane Clark, Faye Emerson, Robert Hutton and William Prince. In 1944, Dall returned to the stage with the lead role in playwright Norman Krasna’s highly successful “Dear Ruth”, which eventually ran for six-hundred and eighty performances. The film rights to the play, however, were purchased by Paramount Studio which cast William Holden in Dall’s original role.

Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to John Patrick’s play “Hasty Heart” with the intention of giving the lead film role to John Dall. In 1945, Dall performed “Hasty Heart” on a three-month stage tour. However as it took several more years before the film was started, casting changes gave the lead role to Irish-British actor Richard Todd. In May of 1946, Warners released Dall from his contract after filming only one role for the studio.

Although Paramount Studio cited interest in signing Dall for an adaption of ”The Wayfarers” based on Becky Chambers’s series of books, Dall signed a seven-year contract with David Selznick’s Vanguard Films in May of 1946. He performed “Hasty Heart” during the summer theater season but was never given any roles by Selznick. Signing with Universal International, he played Canadian actress Deanna Durbin’s love interest in Irving Pichel’s 1947 musical comedy “Something in the Wind”. Dall next appeared in a supporting role in Michael Gordon’s 1948 post-Civil War drama “Another Part of the Forest”.

Founded by Alfred Hitchcock and his longtime associate Sidney Bernstein at the end of World War II, Transatlantic Pictures chose John Dall for one of the lead roles in its first production. Dall and actor Farley Granger played the two killers who matched wits with James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Technicolor 1948 crime thriller “Rope”. On its theatrical release, the film performed poorly at the box office; screenwriter Arthur Laurents attributed the poor performance to audience uneasiness with the homosexual undertones between the characters played by Dall and Granger.

Dall did an hour episode for the ABC anthology radio series “Theater Guild on the Air” and then appeared on Broadway in an adaption of Jean-Paul Satre’s “Red Gloves” with Charles Boyer. In 1949, he made his television debut in The Chevolet Tele-Theatre’s production “Miracle in the Rain”. Dall appeared as one of the leads in Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 crime film-noir “Gun Crazy” playing opposite femme-fatale actress Peggy Cummins. He later had supporting roles in the 1950 crime film-noir “The Man Who Cheated Himself”, playing opposite Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt, and in a revival on Broadway of the romantic drama “The Heiress”, playing alongside Basil Rathbone.

Throughout the 1950s, John Dall appeared in stock productions of such plays as “Gramercy Ghost”, “The Hasty Heart”, “Born Yesterday” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. He worked extensively in television and appeared in guest roles on such shows as Studio One in Hollywood, General Electric Theater, Schlitz Playhouse, The Clock, Broadway Television Theater, and Lights Out. In 1955, Dall returned to Broadway for writer and director Leslie Stevens’s “Champagne Complex”.

Dall’s first film role after a span of eight years was that of the Roman soldier Marcus Glabus, based on the life of Roman military commander Gaius Claudius Glaber, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic historical drama “Spartacus”. This film won four Academy Awards and had the highest ranking box office in Universal Studio’s history until “Airport” in 1970. Dall’s final film performance was as the villain Zaren in George Pal’s 1961 science-fiction film “Atlantis, the Lost Continent”.

As to John Dall’s personal life, there is very little verifiable written record. According to music journalist Phil Milstein, at the time of his death Dall had lapsed into alcoholism and was living with his partner, actor Clement Brace. While visiting London in October of 1970, John Dall sustained a serious fall. He died three months later of cardiac arrest, a complication of myocarditis, at his Beverly Hills home in January of 1971 at the age of fifty. His body was donated to medical science. Dall’s papers and correspondence are housed at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Studio Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Joseph A. Valentine, “John Dall, James Stewart and Farley Granger”, 1948, Film Shot from “Rope”, Director Alfred Hitchcock

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Donald O’Connor, Deanna Durbin and John Dall”, 1947, Pulicity Shot for “Something in the Wind”, Director Irving Pichel, Cinematographer Milton R. Krasner

Fourth Insert Image: Sol Polito, “John Dall and Bette Davis”, 1945, Film Shot from “The Corn is Green”, Director Irving Rapper

Fifth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Russell Harlan, “John Dall”, 1950, Film Shot from “Gun Crazy”, Director Joseph H. Lewis

R. H. Ives Gammell

The Paintings of R. H. Ives Gammell

Born into a wealthy Providence, Rhode Island family in 1883, Robert Hale Ives Gammell was an American artist, one of the last American artists who were trained in the French Academic tradition of the late nineteenth-century. His work shows the influence of French Neoclassical painters Jacque-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gammell was also inspired by the work of his teachers: William Sargeant Kendall, with whom he studied from 1906 to 1914, and Boston artist William McGregor Paxton who mentored him from 1928 to 1930.

R. H. Ives Gammell attended Groton School, a private college-preparatory boarding school, where he spent much of his personal time drawing. His formal art education began at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts under Impressionist painters Joseph DeCamp, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Philip Leslie Hale. Gammell later studied in Paris at the Académia Julian and the Atelier Baschet under genre painter Henri Royer and portrait artist William Laparra. Although he had intended to stay five or six years in France, these studies in Paris were interrupted by his service in the United States military during World War I.

Upon his return to the United States, Gammell briefly returned to his studies at the Boston Museum School. However, he was frustrated as he felt that, although the standards established by the great nineteenth-century painters were generally accepted and understood, the procedures and principles for the construction of large figural compositions and imagined scenes were not being taught. Trained as an impressionist, Gammell was interest in painting decorative subjects in the academic tradition. He began his career in the Boston tradition with portraits, nudes and interior scenes with primarily female figures. As he matured, Gammell turned to ancient history, Greek mythology, literary and religious scenes, and psychology particularly that of C. G. Jung, for his subjects.

R. H. Ives Gammell produced many works in the 1930s; however, the recognition that he was working against the current trend in art and other stress factors led to a nervous breakdown in 1939. While recovering, Gammell read Carl Jung’s “Psychology of the Unconscious” and discovered an approach to a series of paintings based on poet Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”. Read while a sixteen-year old student, this poem had held Gammell’s imagination and formed the basis of a number of sketches. He now saw Jung’s work as a link between myths, symbols, poetry and the recurring emotional patterns of human life.

Gammell had begun planning in 1941 the sequence of images that would embrace many of the themes he had considered throughout his career. His “Hound of Heaven” series consisted of twenty-three large format oil on canvas paintings, each being 200.7 x 68.6 cm in size. These illustrations of Thompson’s poem contain images and symbols drawn from various ancient and modern sources and conjure up deep human responses. The series, completed and exhibited in 1956, is considered by many to be Gammell’s greatest achievement, one which represented his artistic aims and ideas.

Starting in the 1940s, R. H. Ives Gammell taught at the Fenway Studios in Boston. His classes included the study of anatomy, memory drawing and the sight-size method, a technique that ,when viewed from a set vantage point, presents the drawing and subject with exactly the same dimensions. Among his many students were painters Robert Cormier and Richard Frederick Lack, the founder of Classical Realism; Robert Douglas Hunter known for his academic still lifes; and Samuel Rose known for his realistic and surreal subjects.

Gammell publish a book of art criticism in 1946 entitled “Twilight of Painting”, in which he argued that the tradition of European craftsmanship was undermined by modern art with its emphasis on abstraction. He also wrote a monograph on the Boston painter Dennis Miller Bunker, one of the first biographies on this innovator of Impressionism, and the 1961 book “Shop Talk of Edgar Degas”, a discussion of Degas’s connection to the act of painting. Gammell wrote a book of essays entitled “The Boston Painters: 1900-1930”, an examination of the genesis, contributions and motivations of the Boston School artists, many of whom Gammell knew personally. This volume was published posthumously.

Robert Hale Ives Gammell died, at the age of eighty-eight, in his Boston home in April of 1981. His papers, diaries, and notebooks with sketches are housed in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Museum.

Note: A transcript of an 1973 Oral History interview with painter Robert Douglas Hunter, in which he discusses his years as a student of H. R. Ives Gammell, can be found at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art sit located at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212739

Second Insert Image: R.H. Ives Gammell, “The Predicament”, 1958, Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: R. H. Ives Gammell, “William” 1915, Oil on Canvas, 74.9 x 59 cm, Provincetown Art Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Ives Gammell, “The fates”, circa 1930, Oil on Paper, 26.7 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection

Hart Crane: “A Perfect Cry Shall String Some Constant Harmony”

Photographers Unknown, A Perfect Cry Shall String Some Constant Harmony

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by . . .

      I am not ready for repentance;
   Nor to match regrets. For the moth
        Bends no more than the still
      Imploring flame. And tremors
        In the white falling flakes
                   Kisses are – –
        The only worth all granting.

                It is to be learned–
      This cleaving and this burning,
           But only by the one who
          Spends out himself again.

                  Twice and twice
         (Again the smoking souvenir,
      Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
        Until the bright logic is won
         Unwhispering as a mirror
                   Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,–
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.

Hart Crane, Legend

Born in Garrettsville, Ohio in July of 1899, Harold Hart Crane was an American modernist poet considered one of the most influential poets of his generation. He was admired by many artists including playwright Eugene O’Neill, essayist Alan Tate, poet and playwright E.E. Cummings, and writer William Carlos Williams. Important American poets such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell cited Crane as a significant influence.

The son of successful business man Clarence Crane and Grace Edna Hart, Hart Crane had a stressful childhood in which his parents constantly fought. Raised in part by his grandmother in Cleveland, he read continuously in his grandmother’s extensive library which contained the complete editions of such poets as Robert Browning, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As he aged, Crane broadened his interest with writers such as philosopher Plato, novelist Honore de Balzac, and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. His formal education was undermined by long absences from school caused by constant arguments between his parents.

In 1916, Crane left Cleveland without graduating and relocated to New York with the hope of passing the entrance exam to Columbia University. Once settled in New York City, he made the decision to abandon college and concentrate on a literary career. Crane met other writers in the city and became exposed to the various art movements prevalent at that time. As a result of his parents’ divorce in 1917, Crane’s mother and grandmother relocated to New York City and moved into his one-bedroom apartment.

To escape the pressures of family life, Hart Crane attempted to enlist in the army but was rejected due to his young age. He relocated to Cleveland and worked in a munitions factory during World War I. After the war, Crane worked briefly as a reporter for the local “Cleveland Plain Dealer”, worked in New York City for the “Little Review”, and then returned to Cleveland as an employee in his father’s candy company. Tensions between him and his now Cleveland-based family finally erupted in the spring of 1921. This led to Crane resettling back in New York City and two-years of non-communication with his father.

Throughout the early 1920s, Crane published poems in small but respected literary magazines, including “Little Review” and “Seven Arts”, which gained him respect among the avant-garde. By 1922 he had already written many of the poems that would be included in his first collection, “White Buildings”, finished in 1924 and published in 1926. This collection was written when he was falling in love with the Danish merchant mariner Emil Opffer. Their relationship, one of intense sexual passion and occasional turmoil, inspired “Voyages”, a sequence of erotic poems in praise of love. Other poems in the collection include “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, set in contemporary times with Faustus representing a poet seeking ideal beauty, and the notable “Chaplinesque”. Produced after watching Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film “The Kid”, the poem portrayed Crane’s personal outlooks towards adversity and innocence.

By 1924, Hart Crane had already started the first drafts of his ambitious “The Bridge”, a long poem of fifteen sections with a finished length of sixty pages. Using the Brooklyn Bridge as the poem’s symbol, the poem celebrates the American experience from explorer Christopher Columbus to the 1910 opening of the newly constructed East River Tunnel. The Brooklyn Bridge functioned as a source of inspiration and a symbol of the unique American optimism.

The optimism seen in Crane’s “White Buildings” was not quite indicative of his emotional state at that time. In the spring of 1923, he was working at an advertising agency, a job he found tedious and unrewarding. The tumult and loud noises of city life spoiled Crane’s concentration and made his writing difficult. By 1926, his intense relationship with Opffer had faded; this was followed by more conflicts with his mother and the deaths of both his father and grandmother.

Hart Crane began to seek solace in alcohol and sexual encounters. With his inheritance, he fled his mother and traveled to Europe. Crane associated with many prominent figures in Paris’s expatriate community, including Harry Crosby, the owner of the fine art Black Sun Press, who offered Crane the use of his country estate. There Cane wrote a key part of “The Bridge” but continued his alcohol use and engaged in multiple sexual encounters with Marseilles sailors.

Through money lent by Crosby, Crane was able to return to the United States where he finally finished “The Bridge”, which received upon its publication poor reviews from the critics. His pattern of self-destructive behavior, with its alternating depression and elation, continued. Crane entered a creative slump from which he could not recover. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship with the intention to study European culture and American poetry. Granted the fellowship, Crane decided instead to travel in 1931 to Mexico where he had a heterosexual romance with Peggy Baird, the divorced wife of writer Malcolm Cowley. The poem “The Broken Tower”, one of his last published works, emerged from the affair.

Despite the relationship with Peggy Baird, Hart Crane returned to his homosexual activities. Still feeling himself a failure, he returned to New York aboard the steamship Orizaba. During the voyage, Crane was beaten up after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Drinking heavy and leaving no suicide note, he jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico just before noon on the 27th of April in 1932. Crane’s body was never recovered. His father’s tombstone carries the inscription: ‘Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 Lost at Sea’.

Hart Crane’s correspondence, manuscripts, documents, drawings and paintings are housed in the archival collections of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. In the collection are most of the original manuscripts of his major works with corrections and additions in Crane’s hand. Included in this collection are “The Bridge”, “White Buildings” and “West Indies Poems”.

Note: An online collection of Hart Crane’s work can be found in the Digital Collections of the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The site is located at: https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll32

Maurizio Bonfanti

The Paintings of Maurizio Bonfanti

Born in 1952 in Bergamo, a city in the alpine Lombardy region, Maurizio Bonfanti is an Italian painter and the son of fresco painter Angelo Bonfanti. He currently works from his studio in Bergamo close to his home in Torre Boldone.

Maurizio Bonfanti’s formal artistic education began with studies at the Liceo Artistico in Bergamo with additional courses in etching and intaglio at Bergamo’s Accademia di Bella Arti. In addition to his art studies, Bonfanti also studied modern literature at the Università Statale in Milan. In 1973, he left his study of modern literature and began to pursue his career as a painter.

Bonfanti spent the decade of the 1970s exclusively working in the medium of etching but later made the decision to concentrate on painting. His work, which deals with the themes of nature, the human body and urban landscapes, is produced using experimental techniques influenced by his knowledge of etching. Bonfanti paints in thematic cycles, many of which are influenced by his early religious upbringing. His work has been influenced by such figurative artists as painter Renzo Vespignani, sculptor Augusto Perez, and postwar painters Gionfranco Ferroni and Giuseppe Guerreschi.

The development of a specific viewing angle seen in many of Bonfanti’s paintings was influenced by his experience in the photographic field. The focus point for his figurative work lies with the faceless human figures placed central in his compositions. These figures are posed theatrically, either standing, seated or crouching, and often portrayed alone, naked and surrounded by darkness. These compositions, represented in large-format images on canvas paper, display tension between the fragility of man highlighted by body language and the dense mixture of the unraveling, surrounding space. Faceless, the central figure’s condition and emotional state are inferred by the viewer solely through the pose of the depicted body.

Since 1978, Bonfanti’s work has been shown in many collective and solo exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad. He has participated in two prestigious exhibitions at Utrecht’s Contemporary Art Centre in Schalkwijk and showed in major exhibitions in Belgium and Holland. In 2001, on the occasion of the first Day of Remembrance, Bonfanti exhibited a cycle of large-format works entitled “Five Doors in Memory of the Shoah” in the Tempietto of the Synagogue of Turin.

Bonfanti won the 2004 Prize of the Lord Mayor at the International Biennial of Drawing in Pilsen. In 2012, his cycle of works, inspired by the biblical text “Ezechiele: 37”, was exhibited at the Museo Bernareggi in Bergamo. Bonfanti showed his work at the 2015 “A Different Perspective: Artwork by the Laureates of the Biennial of Drawing Pilsen” held at the Museum of West Bohemia. In 2016, his solo show “Limen” was held inside the historic Palazzo Storico del Credito Bergamasco in Bergamo.

Maurizio Bonfanti taught painting techniques at the Liceo Artistico from 1976 to 1983. Since 1983, he has been a teacher of drawing and visual communication at a design and advertising school in Bergamo.

“The surface of the paper on which I create my nudes suffers a series of attacks, which are an integral part of the expressive language of my works. I try to give substance to a smooth and neutral surface, and make it undergo a deterioration alongside the image, which is also intentionally eroded and scratched. The “wounded” paper is then glued to the canvas, creating the image of a body which seems to re-emerge from the past, but carries with it the fragility and energy of contemporary man.” — Maurizio Bonfanti, Excerpt from the 2021 Novitas Gallery exhibition

Second Insert Image: Maurizio Bonfanti, “Figura maschile in Paesaggio Urbano”, 2008, Mixed Technique on Paper on Canvas, 110 x 80 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mauricio Bonfanti, “Confinato VI”, 2020, Acrylic Charcoal and Oil on Paper on MDF Panel, 30 x 30 cm, Private Collection

Erwin Olaf

The Photography of Erwin Olaf

Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands in July of 1959, Erwin Olaf Springveld is a Dutch photographer known for both his personal and commercial work. He is primarily known for his lush large-format color prints of staged scenes that depict complex and dramatic narratives.

Erwin Olaf studied journalism at the School of Journalism in Utrecht. an important Dutch city with roots back to the eighth-century. He started his photographic career by documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s 1980s nightlife. This work soon led to Olaf’s personal exploration of varied series shot in both black-and-white and color. Assuming the role of both photographer and director, he currently shoots cinematic-styled tableaux whose arrangements and diluted color palettes evoke memories of the early 1960s.

Olaf has been commissioned to photograph advertising campaigns for large international companies including Microsoft, Nokia and Levi’s. His bold approach to photography has led to a number of prestigious collaborations, among which have been Louis Vuitton, Vogue Magazine, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Throughout his forty-year career, Olaf has maintained an activist approach to equality. His diverse series center around the issues of society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color, women and the LBGTQ+ community.

Erwin Olaf designed the national side of the 2013 Euro coins for King Willem-Alexander Koning, which commemorated two-hundred years of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Olaf served in 2017 as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family. In 2018, he completed a triptych of photographic and filmic tableaux depicting periods of sudden change in major world cities and their effects. Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands in 2019 after five-hundred works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. He was awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.

Among the many photographic series produced by Olaf are the 2005 “Hope, Grief, Rain” which centers on the suspended moment when emotional reaction begins; the 2012 “Berlin” series shot outside of the studio in six different locations in Berlin, sites reminiscent of the city’s past; the 2020 “Im Wald” which was shot purely on location and highlighted isolated people in their relationship to nature; and the 2001-2002 “Paradise Portraits”, a series of close-up shots of party goers at Amsterdam’s renowned Club Paradiso on New Year’s Eve in 2000.

Erwin Olaf’s work has been shown in major galleries throughout the world, including London’s prestigious photographic space Hamiltons Gallery, Berlin’s Wagner + Partner Gallery, Amsterdam’s Flatland Gallery, and the Galerie Magda Danysz in Paris. Museum exhibitions have included the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, the Fondation Oriente Museu in Macau, the Museo de Arte Contemporaine de Rosario in Argentina, the National Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography. In the summer of 2021, the Kunsthalle München mounted a major exhibition of 220 artworks, including Olaf’s two most recent series, the 2020 “April Fool” and “Im Wald”, the latter of which was made specially for this show.

Note: More information of Erwin Olaf’s work and extensive exhibitions, including videos in which he explains his work, can be found at London’s Hamiltons Gallery website located at: https://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/erwin-olaf/overview/

Erwin Olaf’s website, which includes contact information and an extensive list of exhibitions, is located at: https://www.erwinolaf.com/art

Top Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Second Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Chessmen XII”, 1988, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x37.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Kleines Requiem II”, 2022, Color Print, Edition of Ten, 110 x 110 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Futomuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands