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

Erwin Olaf, a contemporary Dutch photographer recognized for the precision of his staged photographs of both of those countercultural figures and Dutch royalty, died on Wednesday in Groningen, the Netherlands. He was 64.

Shirley den Hartog, his small business partner, explained the demise, in a healthcare facility, was induced by complications of a modern lung transplant. Mr. Olaf experienced struggled for many years with hereditary emphysema, she explained.

Mr. Olaf began his profession as a photojournalist documenting the gay liberation movement in the 1980s before becoming one of the to start with photographers in the Netherlands to phase photographs making use of theatrical costuming and sets. His subjects were often nonconforming to each gender stereotypes and cultural norms — men and women with unconventional bodies, option lifestyles or a penchant for bondage equipment.

“He manufactured explicit illustrations or photos or incredibly suggestive photographs that turned iconic,” explained Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, which owns and displays Mr. Olaf’s work. The pictures, he included, “showed to a bigger general public how significant it is to enable people today be who they are, and to let them express on their own.”

Mr. Olaf’s get the job done progressed around 40 a long time to embrace high-close studio and style photography as effectively as official portraiture. The Dutch royal spouse and children commissioned him to shoot their portraits many periods.

He turned identified internationally as a person of the Netherlands’ a few most essential modern photographers — along with Rineke Dijkstra and Anton Corbijn. To the Dutch he was witnessed as a nationwide treasure.

“We take into account him a ‘Hollandse meester,’” a Dutch master, mentioned Mattie Growth, photography curator at the Rijksmuseum, the countrywide museum in Amsterdam. “He was producing paintings with the digital camera.”

Erwin Olaf Springveld was born on July 2, 1959, to Simon Jacobus Springveld, a revenue manager for an place of work materials business, 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 about by artists, whilst volunteering for the Dutch journal Sek, the official publication of the gay and lesbian activist group COC Nederland.

He bought his 1st paid position as a photographer in 1984 chronicling Amsterdam nightlife and the gay local community with his Nikon 35-millimeter camera for Vinyl, a new wave music magazine. He jettisoned his previous title, Springveld, and went by Erwin Olaf thereafter.

“He begun off remaining a significant photographer of the gay scene, but that was too limited for Erwin,” explained Wim van Sinderen, his previous editor at Vinyl who afterwards became a curator of the Fotomuseum Den Haag, in The Hague, exactly where he exhibited Mr. Olaf’s work. “He was very hot then, and he ongoing to be very scorching for a extended time. He managed to maintain up his status throughout 40 decades.”

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 men developed a close friendship that would previous for a long time.

Mr. van Manen broadened Mr. Olaf’s artistic horizons, introducing him to artists this sort of as the designer Benno Premsela and the artwork photographer Paul Blanca. “In all those yrs, our marriage was like a grasp and a pupil,” Mr. Olaf mentioned of Mr. van Manen in a 2021 interview for a e-book of dance photos the two made together, “Dance in Near-Up.”

The most critical affect on Mr. Olaf’s operate was Robert Mapplethorpe, the paragon of studio photography, whom Mr. Olaf fulfilled although Mr. Mapplethorpe was visiting Amsterdam. He was in particular taken with Mr. Mapplethorpe’s use of square format pictures, a technique also utilized by Peter Hujar and Diane Arbus for their portrait get the job done.

Mr. Olaf quickly purchased a secondhand Hasselblad digicam that, as Mr. van Manen explained, produced these “nice 6-by-6 neat format visuals, with no grittiness, really clear and very useful.”

Other influences provided the uncooked New York street pictures of Weegee and the staged grotesque tableaus of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Not prolonged afterward, Mr. Olaf located a modest studio in a further art squat, hung up a curtain and commenced to shoot his initial staged photos, making use of men and women in his quick circle, these as disco queens and punks. He favored gender-bending costumes reflecting the queer, S&M and drag society of his period. The Hasselblad gave a “classical contact to his incredibly nonclassical imagery,” Mr. van Sinderen explained.

“We call it visible activism,” Ms. den Hartog claimed. “Erwin normally attempted to convey his anger and his criticisms of culture by means of his work.”

Ms. Increase, of the Rijksmuseum, mentioned that staged photography was atypical of the era, especially in the Netherlands, where by documentary photography was in vogue.

Mr. Olaf attained intercontinental focus for the initial time in 1988, when he received the Younger European Photographer of the Yr award for his series “Chessmen,” black-and-white visuals of people transformed into baroque chess parts. An exhibition for “Chessmen” adopted at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, his 1st main solo exhibition.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Olaf switched to digital images, generating a selection of photographic series. For the duration of that time he also set up a profession as a business photographer, producing advertisements for vogue manufacturers like Diesel and Bottega Veneta and the firms Heineken and Nokia.

Mr. Olaf’s most important operate was often portraiture, even if his subjects have been positioned in elaborate sets and donning fantastical costumes. The Dutch author Arthur Japin, whom Mr. Olaf photographed as a lion, reported sitting down for him could really feel liberating.

“When you were being with him you had been mindful that he saw certainly everything about you, but that he did not choose,” Mr. Japin mentioned. “That’s why men and women opened up to him. Some men and women would really go significantly when they have been photographed by him.”

Mr. van Sinderen mentioned that in the early 2000s Mr. Olaf’s noncommercial images took on “a form of uber-kitch built feasible by Photoshop,” but that he altered route after an American museum curator criticized his operate as “Eurotrash.”

He started to examine the is effective of Norman Rockwell and modern painters, in particular Lucien Freud, as well as the cinematic realism of the Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, whom he admired for the “incredible sadness” of his films, Ms. den Hartog explained.

In the end, Mr. Olaf became recognised for a variety of exquisite stillness and perfectionist polish, features that were highlighted in a double exhibition in The Hague on the celebration of his 60th birthday in 2019.

That identical year, the Rijksmuseum exhibited a dozen of his is effective in discussion with an equal selection of Golden Age master paintings by Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch and other individuals. They have been chosen from much more than 500 photographs of Mr. Olaf’s that the Rijksmuseum obtained the earlier calendar year.

In excess of the many years Mr. Olaf designed friends from a wide vary of social circles, like that of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, who in a assertion reported they mourned the decline of a “quirky, exceptionally talented photographer and a excellent artist.”

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

Mr. Olaf was hopeful that his lung transplant previous thirty day period would increase years to his lifestyle, claimed Ms. Boom. “We talked fairly a short while ago, for the duration of the summertime, and he was whole of options,” she mentioned. “After the operation, he believed he would continue on for another 10 several years, and he experienced loads of suggestions.”