Erwin Olaf, Photographer With an Eye for the Theatrical, Dies at 64

Erwin Olaf, a present-day Dutch photographer known for the precision of his staged images of the two countercultural figures and Dutch royalty, died on Wednesday in Groningen, the Netherlands. He was 64.

Shirley den Hartog, his small business partner, mentioned the demise, in a medical center, was brought about by complications of a new lung transplant. Mr. Olaf had struggled for years with hereditary emphysema, she claimed.

Mr. Olaf began his job as a photojournalist documenting the gay liberation movement in the 1980s in advance of becoming 1 of the initially photographers in the Netherlands to phase shots working with theatrical costuming and sets. His topics ended up typically nonconforming to both of those gender stereotypes and cultural norms — people with unconventional bodies, alternative life or a penchant for bondage gear.

“He produced express illustrations or photos or quite suggestive illustrations or photos that grew to become iconic,” reported Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, which owns and displays Mr. Olaf’s operate. The photographs, he additional, “showed to a larger sized public how vital it is to allow people today be who they are, and to permit them specific on their own.”

Mr. Olaf’s operate progressed more than 40 yrs to embrace higher-close studio and fashion photography as perfectly as official portraiture. The Dutch royal spouse and children commissioned him to shoot their portraits a number of occasions.

He grew to become identified internationally as one of the Netherlands’ 3 most significant modern photographers — along with Rineke Dijkstra and Anton Corbijn. To the Dutch he was found as a national treasure.

“We consider him a ‘Hollandse meester,’” a Dutch master, stated Mattie Increase, images curator at the Rijksmuseum, the nationwide museum in Amsterdam. “He was building paintings with the camera.”

Erwin Olaf Springveld was born on July 2, 1959, to Simon Jacobus Springveld, a sales manager for an business materials organization, and Lydia van ’t Hoff, a homemaker, in Hilversum, about 20 miles west of Amsterdam. He graduated from the School for Journalism in Utrecht, intending to turn into a documentary photographer.

He moved to Amsterdam when he was 19 and lived in a squat, a setting up taken in excess of by artists, whilst volunteering for the Dutch journal Sek, the formal publication of the gay and lesbian activist corporation COC Nederland.

He obtained his to start with paid out work as a photographer in 1984 chronicling Amsterdam nightlife and the gay neighborhood with his Nikon 35-millimeter camera for Vinyl, a new wave new music journal. He jettisoned his previous title, Springveld, and went by Erwin Olaf thereafter.

“He began off currently being a key photographer of the gay scene, but that was way too limited for Erwin,” said Wim van Sinderen, his previous editor at Vinyl who later on turned a curator of the Fotomuseum Den Haag, in The Hague, where he exhibited Mr. Olaf’s perform. “He was scorching then, and he continued to be very warm for a extensive time. He managed to preserve up his name during 40 years.”

In 1983, Sek magazine assigned Mr. Olaf to shoot portraits of Hans van Manen, a major Dutch choreographer who was also a photographer. The two adult males produced a shut friendship that would last for decades.

Mr. van Manen broadened Mr. Olaf’s artistic horizons, introducing him to artists these kinds of as the designer Benno Premsela and the artwork photographer Paul Blanca. “In these decades, our partnership was like a master and a pupil,” Mr. Olaf claimed of Mr. van Manen in a 2021 interview for a e-book of dance pictures the two produced with each other, “Dance in Shut-Up.”

The most critical influence on Mr. Olaf’s do the job was Robert Mapplethorpe, the paragon of studio photography, whom Mr. Olaf fulfilled whilst Mr. Mapplethorpe was going to Amsterdam. He was primarily taken with Mr. Mapplethorpe’s use of sq. format images, a technique also utilized by Peter Hujar and Diane Arbus for their portrait operate.

Mr. Olaf shortly acquired a secondhand Hasselblad camera that, as Mr. van Manen mentioned, built these “nice 6-by-6 neat structure images, with no grittiness, incredibly clear and very educational.”

Other influences included the raw New York street images of Weegee and the staged grotesque tableaus of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Not lengthy afterward, Mr. Olaf discovered a tiny studio in a further art squat, hung up a curtain and began to shoot his initially staged photos, utilizing people in his quick circle, these kinds of as disco queens and punks. He favored gender-bending costumes reflecting the queer, S&M and drag society of his era. The Hasselblad gave a “classical contact to his quite nonclassical imagery,” Mr. van Sinderen claimed.

“We get in touch with it visual activism,” Ms. den Hartog claimed. “Erwin always tried using to specific his anger and his criticisms of modern society as a result of his operate.”

Ms. Growth, of the Rijksmuseum, explained that staged photography was atypical of the period, especially in the Netherlands, wherever documentary images was in vogue.

Mr. Olaf reached international awareness for the initially time in 1988, when he won the Youthful European Photographer of the Yr award for his series “Chessmen,” black-and-white photographs of human beings transformed into baroque chess pieces. An exhibition for “Chessmen” followed at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, his initially major solo exhibition.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Olaf switched to digital pictures, generating a range of photographic series. Throughout that time he also recognized a occupation as a industrial photographer, making advertisements for style manufacturers like Diesel and Bottega Veneta and the providers Heineken and Nokia.

Mr. Olaf’s principal get the job done was often portraiture, even if his subjects ended up positioned in elaborate sets and donning fantastical costumes. The Dutch writer Arthur Japin, whom Mr. Olaf photographed as a lion, mentioned sitting down for him could truly feel liberating.

“When you ended up with him you ended up aware that he observed certainly almost everything about you, but that he did not judge,” Mr. Japin claimed. “That’s why people today opened up to him. Some people today would seriously go considerably when they had been photographed by him.”

Mr. van Sinderen said that in the early 2000s Mr. Olaf’s noncommercial images took on “a kind of uber-kitch made probable by Photoshop,” but that he improved direction soon after an American museum curator criticized his perform as “Eurotrash.”

He began to check out the performs of Norman Rockwell and up to date painters, particularly Lucien Freud, as very well as the cinematic realism of the Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, whom he admired for the “incredible sadness” of his videos, Ms. den Hartog said.

Ultimately, Mr. Olaf grew to become acknowledged for a type of beautiful stillness and perfectionist polish, attributes that were highlighted in a double exhibition in The Hague on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2019.

That identical 12 months, the Rijksmuseum exhibited a dozen of his operates in conversation with an equivalent number of Golden Age master paintings by Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch and other folks. They had been selected from additional than 500 pictures of Mr. Olaf’s that the Rijksmuseum acquired the previous 12 months.

In excess of the decades Mr. Olaf produced close friends from a broad variety of social circles, which include that of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, who in a assertion stated they mourned the reduction of a “quirky, exceptionally proficient photographer and a fantastic artist.”

Mr. Olaf is survived by his partner, Kevin Edwards, whom he married in 2016, and his two brothers, Jos and Ron Springveld.

Mr. Olaf was hopeful that his lung transplant very last thirty day period would insert years to his lifetime, said Ms. Boom. “We talked fairly a short while ago, in the course of the summer season, and he was complete of designs,” she explained. “After the procedure, he even though he would carry on for one more 10 decades, and he had heaps of concepts.”