It is easy to be suddenly taken by a heavy sense of uneasiness while looking at Erwin Olaf's images. His carefully arranged sets and settings populated by disturbingly mysterious characters conjure up indeed a sense of oppression, fear and anxiety. His latest series, "Berlin", is part of an exhibition currently on at the Rabouan Moussion Gallery in Paris.
Born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands, Olaf studied journalism at the School of Journalism in Utrecht where he discovered photography, realising he wasn't interested in documenting the reality surrounding him, but in portraying his own world.
The recipient of many awards, throughout the years Olaf developed advertising campaigns and controversially provoking shoots that tackled themes such as fear, grief, loss, loneliness and melancholy.
The twenty pictures - seven scenes, thirteen portraits and two self-portraits - included in the exhibition at the Rabouan Moussion Gallery move from a historical moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Though this year symbolically represented a global moment of freedom and euphoria, the reunification was actually more painful and slower than imagined. Berlin, the creative capital of Europe with its booming party scene in the '90s, turns in Olaf's images into a city of contrasts, of tensions, lights and shadows, past and present, decadence and glamour.
The rhythm of the images is operatic with the main protagonists assuming different masks and roles, revealing themselves as allegories of decay, decadence and tragedy. A young girl in a flounced skirt sits on an armchair and provokingly looks at the camera; a clown stands on a diving board with a sealed envelope; a black athlete with his chest covered in medals looks as if he were annoying an insufferable child in a double-breasted suits and leather gloves, maybe a scene that references Jesse Owens, the athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games to Hitler’s annoyance.
In some cases Olaf's characters look as if they have just escaped from a canvas, in others they may have been borrowed from a carefully assembled film set in which everything - clothes, hairstyles, decoration and furniture - is beautiful, but nothing is harmonious, and the light sculpts their faces in a maniacally precise way that isolates the characters in their loneliness. Olaf also appears in two self-portraits turning into the protagonist of his own Berlin wanderings.
The pictures are surreal, but while the chiaroscuro effects are borrowed from Caravaggio, the moods may have been derived from Luchino Visconti's The Damned.
While looking at these images you easily get an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty, as if you were watching people dancing on the edge of a precipice, symbolically represented in the images by the many stairs the photographer encountered in Berlin.
The images - the result of a project Olaf developed with the prize money of the Johannes Vermeer Award - were shot in seven locations, including the Rathaus (where John F. Kennedy stated: "Ich bin ein Berliner"); in the fencing hall at the Olympic Stadium and the Masonic lodge.
For the Berlin project, Olaf experimented with carbon pressure induction printing, a technique that, allowing him to combine digital and old-fashioned technologies, also prompts the viewers to contemplate these images from the point of view of their own lives.
Berlin by Erwin Olaf is at the Galerie Rabouan Moussion, 121 rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris, until 23rd November 2013.
Image credits
All images Courtesy Galerie Rabouan Moussion
1. Portait 05, 9th July 2012, Fuji Chrystal Archive Digital Paper
2. Stadtbad Neuköln, 23rd April 2012, Fuji Crystal Archive Digital Paper
3. Freimaurer Loge Dahlem, 22nd April 2012, Fuji Crystal Archive Digital Paper
4. Olympia Stadion Westend, Self-portrait, 25th April 2012, Fuji Crystal Archive Digital Paper
5. Tar & Feathers, Self-portrait, 2012, Chromogenic Print
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