Erwin Blumenfeld — photographer of beautiful women

His influence has been recognized by fashion photographers from Helmut Newton to Guy Bourdain and David Lachapelle. He shot Audrey Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich. He was America's highest paid photographer. We are talking about the phenomenon of Erwin Blumenfeld, a man who filmed beautiful women."

Blumenfeld was an innovator: he not only set the tone for the fashion of those times on the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, but also experimented day after day with shooting techniques, visualizing his expressive minimalist vision through the prism of mirrors, veils, solarization, long exposure, Dadaist collages. He anticipated video advertising and, unlike modern photographers, worked on the photo himself from beginning to end, developing films and conjuring over each frame.

To create an impressive shot, he didn't need a lot of colors — the point was how to properly dispose of them in the frame. And to express his own "I", not to order, he needed only two colors — black and white.

In 1950, Blumenfeld became the highest paid photographer on the planet. By this time, 53-year-old Erwin had managed to change several countries and continents.

Born in Germany to a Jewish family, Blumenfeld survived two world wars: in the first he was sent to serve in the army, and during the second he and his family spent two years in a concentration camp in France — by that time he was already shooting for French Vogue, a contract with which another one beat out for him in the late 30s The guru of photography is Cecil Beaton. Erwin managed to escape from the camp, fleeing with his family first to North Africa, and then to America, to New York, where he was offered a job by Carmel Snow from Harper's Bazaar.

The photographer's pictures appeared in Life magazine, and the cosmetic brands Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, L'Oréal owed their advertising campaigns to him at that time.

Blumenfeld shot style icons of that time — Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, but his daughter Lisette still remained his favorite muse and model — he left an impressive archive of photographs, drawings, films, collages to her, his mistress and two other children.

To understand how Blumenfeld's world was arranged, you can not only look at the photos: in 1975, six years after his death, Erwin's caustic autobiography Eye to I was first published, where, among other things, he described his alleged death.

The photographer died, deliberately provoking a heart attack in fear that the end of his life would be spent in hospitals, and a new generation of artists would come in his place. Blumenfeld wanted everything to end in one moment, but did not take into account that this moment would turn into eternity — like, for example, his black-and-white shot of Lisa Fonsagrives balancing on the edge of the Eiffel Tower.