Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1897, Erwin Blumenfeld was a generation older than Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and Irving Penn (1917-2009), who he worked alongside in the 1940s and 50s after emigrating to America. Blumenfeld took up photography at age 10, served in the German military in WWI, then moved to Amsterdam where he became part of the Dada art movement, embracing the experimental, conceptual, and radical aspects of photography.
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Blumenfeld drew inspiration from American artist May Ray (1890-1976), whose innovations in the medium (solarizations, photomontage, collage superimpositions) became an integral part of the visual language of Surrealism — which Blumenfeld employed throughout his career. After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, Blumenfeld created Grauenfresse / Hitler in 1933 (collage and ink on photomontage), which was later used for Allied propaganda. This work is aligned that of his contemporaries, German artists John Heartfield (1891-1968) and Otto Dix (1891-1969) whose work appeared in the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition.
Denied Dutch citizenship after being arrested for dropping a shoulder strap on his bathing suit at the beach, Blumenfeld — then a married father of three — moved to Paris in late 1935 to work a fashion photographer for French Vogue, thanks to an introduction from British photographer Cecil Beaton (1904–1980). After Hitler invaded France, the family was split and interned in camps across France, fortunate to reunite and escape on a perilous journey to the US in 1941.
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Blumenfeld opened his studio on Central Park South in 1943, his connections and experience landing him at the center of fashion photography and glossy magazines. He shot for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, as well as picture magazines like Look and Life, which dominated the landscape of photography during the mid-20th century with their large format color spreads of long-form photo reportage.
But for Blumenfeld, commercial photography was a means, not an ends, to continue to experiment, explore, and expand the language of photography beyond the capitalist enterprise that subjugated it in the service of sales and marketing. “Photography is a means of creating images, and, as such, it need not confine itself to dull records of ham sandwiches, or vacuous girls with paint. Unfortunately, there is a mistaken feeling among some of those who decide what people shall see that nobody but a select few cares to view anything but dull records,” Erwin Blumenfeld told Commerce Camera magazine in 1948.
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That very year, Eve Arnold (1912–2012) started photographing fashion shows in Harlem, but couldn’t get the work published in the United States. She sent them to Picture Post in London, which ran them in 1951 in an 8-page feature accompanied by racist screed degrading the people she photographed. Arnold soon thereafter joined Magnum Photos, and never allowed her work to be used in such a manner again.
Having survived World War I and escaped Nazism, Blumenfeld was uniquely poised to perceive the radical changes taking place in the United States during the 1950s as the political tides turned from the Red Scare to the Civil Right Movement. Recognizing the conceptual, aesthetic, and political limitations of the mainstream/state media, he continuously pushed the boundaries and reinvented the form, perhaps knowing how we see the world shapes how we think about it.
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His granddaughter, Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit, wrote: “He deplored his difficulty in imposing his ideas on artistic directors obsessed with commercial prerogatives, but prided himself on ‘smuggling art’ into these images.” Blumenfeld may have employed similar techniques to ensure Bani Yelverton was cast for the Rage of Color shoot.
