A tribute to Erwin Olaf, the visionary photographer and LGBTQ icon

For Dutch photographer and gay rights activist Erwin Olaf (1959–2023), the camera was an instrument of art, no different from a paintbrush or violin in its ability to construct imaginary worlds.

Olaf came to photography as a journalism student in 1977, graduating into a sluggish economy where jobs were scarce. He started volunteering with local LGBTQ groups, learning to compose and publish pictures, while finding his place in Amsterdam’s nightlife scene.

“The camera gave me the key to enter worlds that intrigued me, that I wanted to observe,” Olaf told me in 2021. He opened a photo studio, where he began developing a vision that fused portraiture, fashion, and conceptual photography into cinematic visions of the human condition at the turn of the new millennium.

The recent exhibition, Erwin Olaf: Stages at Edwynn Houk in New York, offered an intimate look back at the artist’s poignant and provocative four-decade career. The consummate perfectionist, Olaf crafted sumptuous tableaux that combined the spectacle of cinema and the grandeur of old master paintings to hypnotic effect, transforming the photograph into a theatrical stage.

“Erwin saw the people no one else noticed. He was able to enter a room, scan it, and see that one person hiding behind the bar,” says Shirley den Hartog, Olaf's long-time studio manager and the executor of his estate.

“He would put people on pedestals that had never been up there before; We now call that activism, but for him, it was a natural process,” she continues, “Erwin was bullied a lot when he was younger and later came to the big city of Amsterdam as an outcast. I believe that his photography stems from these positions.”

From his early 1980s studio portraits of Amsterdam’s club kids, drag queens, fetishists, bodybuilders, and nightlife personalities to elaborately designed scenes of passion, mystery, and glamour in series like Gay Couples (2008), Keyhole (2011-13), and Palm Springs (2018), Olaf distills scenes crackling with an exquisite frisson wholly his own.

After 28 years working shoulder to shoulder with Olaf, what den Hartog remembers most about the photographer is that “he did not live reality. You can find reality when you look out the window. He liked it more when reality had a little crack in it, reality with a little flaw.”

Olaf photographed inside the space where reality could be bent to his will, using it as a way to speak truth to power. Den Hartog describes him as a “news junkie” and used the raw emotions it unleashed to fuel his creativity.

“When Erin came to the studio in the morning, I often knew what time it was,” den Hartog says. “He often photographed out of anger or incomprehension.

But Olaf was ultimately an optimist, whose faith in the transformative power of art began with the artist being open, present, and receptive. Den Hartog draws wisdom from his life: “Always keep your eyes open to everything around you, who knows who you might encounter or what you might see.”

Erwin Olaf: Stages was on view at Edwynn Houk in New York.

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