How Erwin Olaf Created Art at the Seams of Lived Experience

Early on in his photography career, Dutch artist Erwin Olaf photographed male models wearing ladies’ hats. In one of these black-and-white images, Hennie (1985), a nude male model leans into Olaf’s frame, staring directly at his implied audience. Atop his head is a velvet, wide-brimmed black chapeau. The model’s androgyny and eccentric sartorial choice aside, it is the plasticity of the image that keeps the viewer looking. Olaf marshaled all the specificities of the image—the model’s subtle pursed lip, his downturned and shadowed left shoulder, the determination of his gaze and the angle of his posture—with a deft neatness and scrupulousness.

The Ladies Hats series was one of the first collections in which Olaf played with über-artificiality, and it would be his unique brand of precise puppeteering that would define much of his work over the four decades following the series’ first photographs. Olaf justified his fascination with staging in a New York Times interview, one of the artist’s last before his death in September of 2023: “I could stage my own fantasy, my own dream world, my own surrealism [in the studio].”

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The Edwynn Houk Gallery centered this dream-like, synthetic quality in the recently closed retrospective, “Erwin Olaf: Stages,” which did a fine job of showing how Olaf mapped his visual fantasies onto the world’s props. Of the twenty-three in the exhibition, The Farewell (2018) from Olaf’s Palm Springs collection stood out. In it, we see a young gay couple—one of the pair uniformed in some sort of military apparel, the other bare save for shorts—touching foreheads in the middle of a mod ’60s-era living room. A large rucksack stands at attention behind the uniformed half of the pair. Their bodies, caught in an intimate goodbye, seem to be held up in the universe by a string. It’s clear the pair are on the brink of something sinister, like a secret spoken under breath. Off to war? Extended separation? A breakup? It’s unclear, but the image is just one tug away–one frame away, really–from the opening of its seams, from a shift into the explicit. Regardless, the tension remains, amplified by Olaf’s intentional obscurity.

Olaf similarly stages other photographs—The Board Room (2004) from the Rain collection, The Boxing School (2005) from the Hope collection and Caroline (2007) from the Grief collection—at the brink of change. Loneliness haunts all three. Man and woman stand perpendicularly in The Board Room, the man looking past the woman and the woman angling away from the man. In The Boxing School, two men—perhaps, sparring partners—face opposite corners of the ring. In Caroline, the eponymous Caroline sits cross-legged on a sofa facing away from the lens; a rocks glass half filled sits forgotten on the side table across from her. 

For all their high production and excessive staging, these images are not scrubbed of messy interaction. Whatever disagreements, emotional turmoil, power struggles or external stressors that precede or succeed the moment captured are left implicit, still within the moment but not emphatically demonstrated.

Erwin Olaf died a little over a year ago, after a two-decades-long battle with emphysema, and the “Stages” retrospect was particularly meaningful given that it marked the anniversary of his passing. Even in our most curated, polished moments, we are composed of seams that threaten to pull apart, revealing the cracks in which our messy human experiences exist, like Olaf’s own “crack” of health complications. With his photographs, Olaf invited us to reject a defeatist view of our seams—sewn up tight or torn asunder—and to revel in their artfulness.

“I have a harsh-sounding voice, walking up the stairs is getting less easy and long-haul flights are harder,” Olaf said of his illness, but he also framed it as a source of inspiration. “You go deeper inside, and then you explore new subjects.”