Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1939. Erwin Blumenfeld Exhibition poster.

Blumenfeld, Erwin (1897?1969)

Editore: San Francisco: Modernism, 2006

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Poster. 81 x 51cm. Erwin Blumenfeld was constantly within the avant-gardes of Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and New York, in a career spanning six decades and a multiplicity of artistic personas including the youthful anarchistic Dada collagist, the technologically innovative fine art photographer, and the successful and influential fashion photographer.It was in his mid thirties that Blumenfeld became a photographer, partly through accident and partly through economic circumstances. From 1923 to 1935 he owned a leather goods shop in Amsterdam, from which he sold women's handbags and whose windows he decorated his photographs. In 1932 he moved the shop to a new location where he discovered a fully equipped darkroom. This became his first studio. After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, deliveries of leather goods to Germany ceased so Blumenfeld decided to persuade his female clients to let him photograph them. He submitted these works to Ullstein, the publishing house, whose blunt rejection merely served to strengthen his resolve: ?That death sentence left me cold. I knew I was a photographer.? Two exhibitions in Amsterdam, and later the appearance of his pictures in Photographie, the annual supplement of the Parisian journal Arts et métiers graphiques, confirmed his decision. By 1938, with the publication of several photographs in the quarterly magazine Verve (alongside those of Man Ray, Brassaï, Raoul Ubac) and his first work for French Vogue, his reputation was assured. In 1939 Blumenfeld's photo of Lisa Fonssagrives standing on the top of the Eiffel Tower fanning out her dress was selected as the principal image for the May issue devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of the tower.Blumenfeld borrowed the element of surprise from his Dadaist experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, and translated it into his pictures of dresses, hats, and fashion accessories. In his photographs his raised the question of whether one can show a fashionable object with documenting it. His photography is characterized by the use of a large variety of darkroom techniques: print solarization, superimposed images, negative?positive combinations, as well as the crystallization of the negative, dried through refrigeration. Codice articolo 51-5623

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Titolo: Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower, Paris...

Casa editrice: San Francisco: Modernism

Data di pubblicazione: 2006

Legatura: Brossura

Condizione: Good