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.

The precise line of a masterpiece - architectural renderings of the Petit Trianon, circa 1907-08

Originally published in three oversized portfolios in 1907 and the following year, with a single volume also appearing in 1908, the ninety-seven plates with accompanying text were then reprinted in various smaller sized editions upwards of eleven times, the last dated 1929. This is a selection of the plates, a large number of which were renderings of furniture which I've not included, pieces that were used to give the building some semblance of what it looked like before the Revolution, but which actually had little or no connection to the original furnishings or occupants.

Because these remarkable images were created using thousands of very fine lines, they don't digitally reduce well; the lines distort and the images lose definition. Trying to add sharpness back in only distorts them further. So I've added the images to the post in their original size, and it takes an extra step to see them properly. In Windows, click on the image and then right click and choose "Open image in new tab" to view all the incredible detail. (I believe it's a similar process if you're using a Mac.) I apologize for the inconvenience, but the present format is so limiting. I've been looking online for large files of these images for years. Literally. So I hope that blog visitors who're as nerdy as I am about these things will be able to overlook the annoyance of that extra step in order to enjoy all the information and beautiful precision to be found in these exquisite renderings.