Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf is anything but low-key. His pictures can be quite loud. On his website we read (and let’s leave the capitals for added effect): ‘OVER THE YEARS MANY OF OLAF'S WORKS - FROM HIS UNABASHED NUDE PORTRAITURE AND INTENSE SYMBOLISM TO THE UNFLINCHING GAZE IN HIS BLOOD-DRENCHED IMAGES OF STAGED VIOLENCE - HAVE PROVOKED CONTROVERSY. NOT SURPRISINGLY, THIS ABILITY TO ATTRACT ATTENTION HAS SEEN HIS WORK EMBRACED BY THE ADVERTISING WORLD.’
Unabashed, controversy, attracting attention. Doesn’t sound like his art is quietly contemplative (even his ‘Grief Portraits’ series have a fine dose of exuberance to them), conventionally tasteful or even remotely modest (anyone for a photo montage of the Princess of Wales with a Mercedes Benz star encrusted in her bloodied upper arm?) Nothing wrong with that though, because sometimes modesty in an artist can be as fake as passion in a call girl.
The New York Times commissioned Olaf to illustrate a New York Times Magazine cover story about young gay couples. The outcome is
Far from Heaven gone photography or, even better,
Pleasantville with a John Waters dose of camp. Yet, strangely enough, that camp aspect is subdued and...well...kind of
subtle. Olaf’s pictures look like they came straight out of a 1950s fashion magazine, only his domestic bliss is decidedly of the gay variety. Here you don’t see dad enjoying his pipe and the comfort of his new polyester pants while reading the newspaper, or mom vacuuming around his slippered feet with a lipstick smile and in shiny patent leather heels that look more appropriate for the cocktail parties they throw on weekends for the neighbours.
According to the photographer it only took some improvisation, a bit of straightening and the usual digital manipulation to ‘elevate the ordinary’. And elevate he did, complete with Lucille Ball-like happiness, shiny interiors and that optimistic fifties sense of ‘hey.. we got the Russians lurking at us but all’s still well in our little corner of the world’. Thus Olaf, whose work will be on show in The Hague in September 2008, also succeeded in capturing the question the editors asked themselves: gay men marrying at an increasingly younger age, is that a sign of progress or does it indicate a return to the cosy middle-class mentality of days long gone but reconstructed so deliciously by Olaf?
The Aperture Foundation will publish a book devoted solely to Erwin Olaf's works in September 2008.
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