Erwin Blumenfeld American, 1897-1969

Erwin Blumenfeld (1897–1969) was a pioneer of fashion photography and one of the most inventive photographers of the twentieth century. He came to fashion through Dada, bringing with him a radical darkroom practice of veils, mirrors, opaque glass, solarisation, multiple exposures and sandwiched negatives that transformed the conventions of magazine photography into something closer to art. He photographed more Vogue covers than any other photographer of his generation, and these covers remain among the works for which he is best known.

Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, Blumenfeld was given a camera at the age of eleven and considered himself a photographer from that moment on. At fourteen, he made a self-portrait dressed as Pierrot. He initially entered the garment trade, but after the First World War crossed clandestinely into the Netherlands in December 1918, where he became part of the Dada circle surrounding George Grosz, Paul Citroen and Walter Mehring and made collages under the name Jan Bloomfield. He later ran a leather-goods shop on Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, photographing its customers and developing his work in a darkroom behind the shop.

From the beginning, Blumenfeld regarded photography as an art and valued sincerity above commercial considerations. His aim was not simply to document a fashionable object, but to discover the most compelling way of presenting it. The Amsterdam dealer Carel van Lier exhibited his photographs twice and encouraged him to move to Paris, where he settled at the end of 1935 and established himself as a portrait photographer, photographing figures including Josephine Baker, Cecil Beaton, Leonor Fini, Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Beaton, who admired his work, introduced him to Michel de Brunhoff at French Vogue, which commissioned him in 1938. A visit to New York in August 1939 led to a contract with Harper’s Bazaar.

The outbreak of war caught Blumenfeld in France. Interned as an enemy alien and subsequently persecuted as a Jew following the surrender of June 1940, he was held in the camps at Montbard-Marmagne, Loriol, Le Vernet and Catus while his family was separated. He eventually secured a family visa, and they reached New York in 1941. “It was only luck,” he wrote later, “that he and his family escaped with nothing worse than the fright of their lives.”

Blumenfeld was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar soon after his arrival in New York and produced his first color cover. From 1944, he worked for Condé Nast, photographing covers for Vogue until 1955, while also contributing to Cosmopolitan, Life, Look and Pageant. The Museum of Modern Art included his work in In and Out of Focus in 1948. He died in Rome in 1969, while on a trip he had undertaken against his doctors’ advice.

Blumenfeld’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024) and REWIND (2021).