Mannequin portant des bijoux Boucheron - photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue, Paris, 1939

 

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Erwin Blumenfeld (26 January 1897, Berlin – 4 July 1969, Rome), German-born American photographer. Born to atheist Jewish parents, as a young man he worked in the clothes trade and wrote poetry. In 1918 he went to Amsterdam. He married in 1921 - he and his wife would have three children - and the following year he started a leather goods shop; the business failed in 1935. He moved to Paris a year later and established himself as a photographer, doing free-lance work for French Vogue. After the outbreak of the Second World War he was designated an "undesirable alien" and placed in several French internment camps. But in 1941, he was able to emigrate to the United States, where he soon became a successful and well-paid fashion photographer, working for Harper's Bazaar, Life, and American Vogue. His personal work showed the influence of Dadaism and Surrealism, and he was expert in laboratory work, experimenting with photographic techniques such as distortion, multiple exposure, photomontage, and solarization.

Hitler / Grauenfresse (Hitler / face of horror).

In 1933 Blumenfeld created a photomontage combining an image of Hitler with that of a human skull, placing a swastika on the Führer's forehead. In 1943 the American military chose to reproduce Blumenfeld’s photomontage and drop millions of copies of it over German cities in the form of Allied propaganda.