Blumenfeld: The Photographer, the Artist

One of my all-time favourite fashion images: ‘Portfolio de Vogue: La Tour Eiffel’, French Vogue, May 1939. Lucien Lelong dress; model: Lisa FonssagrivesErwin Blumenfeld (1897–1969) is a photographer most famous for his fashion images. He was, in fact, once the world’s most highly paid fashion photographer. From the late 1930s to the 1960s, he worked for such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, where he transformed fashion images into high art. He photographed the greatest couture fashions of the day, by Lelong, Chanel, Balenciaga, Piguet, Dior and Charles James in both Paris and New York.

After dabbling in Dada, painting and art dealing, Blumenfeld took up photography in the 1920s. He was highly inventive in and out of the darkroom. He developed a unique, hybrid style, using solarisation and negative printing; layering textures in-camera (shooting through lace, for example) and through double and multiple exposures; painting with light and colour. It is wonderful to see the artist’s hand at work in the time before pixels, and marvel how much can be achieved.

It is wonderful to see the artist’s hand at work in the time before pixels, and marvel how much can be achieved.

Bicorne hats by Schiaparelli; unpublished image for French Vogue, Oct 1938.Immigrating to America in 1941 with his family (and narrowly escaping death in concentration camps), Blumenfeld took up a contract with Harper’s Bazaar. The editor-in-chief, Carmel Snow, for whom he’d previously worked in Paris in the 1930s, put him immediately to work on the next issue.

His friend Cecil Beaton, writing from a besieged Britain, was envious of his freedom. Beaton encouraged him to ‘seek out the most talented people on the magazine: the two photographers he most admired, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and George Hoyningen-Huene, and Bazaar’s fashion editor the “magnifique” Diana Vreeland’. Blumenfeld was certainly in good company there, especially when one considers his first art director was the great Alexey Brodovitch.

‘Violettes de Montezin’, French Vogue, Feb 1939Although the editors of Harper’s Bazaar touted Blumenfeld as the cultured European artist who would add cachet to the magazine, Blumenfeld, much to his dismay, began to hear his profession referred to in terms considerably less elevated: ‘commercial photographer’. To his credit, Blumenfeld believed that fashion was a significant form of cultural expression, but that of all the professionals working on a magazine, it was the photographer who was most responsible for whatever ‘art’ appeared on its pages. (Editors and art directors were far more commercially driven.)

He and Brodovitch hit it off however, for unlike other photographers, Blumenfeld was not precious about the full frame of his negative; he understood the image-enhancing aspect of cropping and bleeding images and often conceptualised within these parameters himself. Both men knew that ‘the page with its synthesis of image and text, was, in magazine terms, the final artwork’.

However, his fashion images, excised from the page, easily stand alone as works of art in themselves.

Images and quotes from Blumenfeld: A Fetish For Beauty, by William A. Ewing, Thames & Hudson 1996. Click images for larger versions.

Untitled fashion photograph, Paris, c. 1939Unpublished fashion image, American Vogue, Sep 1945 Untitled fashion assignment, New York, 1945 The Spanish Veil, Paris, 1937Untitled fashion image, New York, 1945 Untitled, New York, c. 1944 ‘Retouching the figure’, American Vogue, Feb 1953Untitled fashion image, New York, 1952Untitled photograph, New York, c. 1955‘What looks new: a milliner experiments with halftones in lipsticks and powders’, American Vogue, Mar 1947Untitled fashion image, New York, 1947