Erwin Olaf: Traveling Souls

There is continuity between Erwin Olaf’s different projects. Im Wald, with its emphasis on Nature, recalls the series Palm Springs shot in 2018, and takes the counterpoint of Shanghai, another series shot in 2018, which was about the city and what is quintessentially urban.

The choice of black and white here is a way to depict a harsh and threatening nature, but also the artist’s desire to go back to his debuts in photography. In this sense it is reminiscent of such works as Chessmen or Ladies Hats, some of his most renown earlier works.

Olaf likes to dialogue with art history. In 2019, the exhibition 12 x Erwin Olaf at the Rijksmuseum placed his photographs in conversation with Dutch paintings by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Breitner, who have been a great source of inspiration for the artist throughout his career.

With Im Wald we see many references to 19th-century German romantic painting. One of them points to Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, this famous painting where a young man is seen from the back, standing on top of a rock overlooking a blanket of mist. This time, the man is older: Erwin Olaf took the place of the young wanderer. This time, it is Nature that towers over everything.

Erwin Olaf prints his photographs himself in his studio. It is essential for him to have full control over the final product, and to pay as much as attention to the printing as to the shooting.  “The craftsmanship of photography is really still very much part of my being,” he says. “I love to combine the content with craftsmanship. The making of the print is the emotion of the photography — the paper you choose, and the preciseness of the light is very important, the focus and the depth of the shadow.”

In older works, such as one from Chessmen, a series of naked figures surrealistically dressed in S&M chess pieces, which earned Erwin Olaf the Young European Photographer Award in 1988, and brought him worldwide attention, one can see almost 25 years later Olaf's photographic roots. For the artist who was influenced by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton, this was a liberating starting point in the exploration of his own vocabulary.

In series as Paradise, shot on 2001, as well as Shanghai, shot in the eponym city in 2018, one can see Erwin Olaf's taste for portraiture and his eye for expressions and emotions.

 “He is one of the protagonists of this painterly style of photography, and also the narrative style. His are single-image narratives. I always call it one-still cinema. You don’t know what happened before and you don’t know how the story will go on, so it’s one-image cinema, and that makes it very enigmatic and irritating, in a nice way.”

- Wim van Sinderen, curator of the Erwin Olaf exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague.