BLUMENFELD Erwin (Photographer)

Legs are wrapped in damp muslin; this is not a fashion image but a beauty one. This photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld is reminiscent of his first art success, a suite of collages and altered images in the style of Berlin Dada. His late work in New York was equally cryptic, often obscuring the nude with smoke, mirrors and shadows, and implying spiritual forms through reference to the body. In between, in a series of photographs in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar in the 1930s through to the 1960s, he addressed fashion, but often subjected icons of beauty to his own obscurities and emendations. He allowed body parts to stand for the whole (most famously in a cover image of lips and eye for Vogue in January 1950), rendering fashion misty and mystical. Blumenfeld came to fashion at the age of forty-one. He was an experimenter who reserved his admiration, and film, for the work of great designers such as Balenciaga and Charles James. 

Also look up for Dalí, Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray