Berlin Freimaurer loge dahlem, 2012
Erwin Olaf

The acclaimed Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, known for his painstakingly polished and staged images that seem to sit somewhere between a painting and a photo, is a director in the truest sense of the word.

Against a real-life backdrop he has scouted carefully, Olaf styles his scene down to every last detail: from delivering actors the sudden fictitious, tragic news about the loss of their mother or job, so as to “trap" the first tear they shed (“Grief" series, 2007), to bringing his own fake boulder all the way to the rocky Austrian mountains (“Im Wald" series, 2020).

“There are a trillion rocks here, but Erwin must and will bring his own fake one. After all, reality is crap!" the photographer remarked with a chuckle in the behind-the-scenes documentary for his latest series.

He started out as a photojournalist in the early 1980s, documenting gay rights movements in Amsterdam, but reality soon became something not to be registered as it is, but to be recreated with a touch of his own surreal imagination and fantasy.

“Portrait #5" (2005) from Olaf's “Hope" series / Courtesy of the artist

“I use photography to show you my imagination, to create the worlds that I see in my head," Olaf said on Zoom at the Suwon Ipark Museum of Art in Gyeonggi Province. On display are more than 110 of his images, spanning four decades, making “Perfect Moment ― Incomplete World" his largest retrospective, not only in Korea, but anywhere Asia.

“I need to stage everything, because my imagination is always unreal. It's always in connection with what's going on in my mind, and partly with what's going on in the real world," he added.

This mix of reality and fantasy, achieved through his perfectionist approach to composition, ethereal lighting and the look in the actors' eyes, gives birth to a hauntingly beautiful, yet unsettling series of images that never fails to absorb the viewer.

Behind the romantic, painterly aesthetics, lies a veiled commentary on the broken side of our fast-paced society and human fragility, marked by arrogance and disconnection.

Two of his latest series, produced in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, are on view.

“09:45am" (2020) from Olaf's “April Fool" series / Courtesy of the artist

“April Fool" paints a surreal state of nightmarish paralysis, as the constant forward movement of human economies suddenly came to a halt at the start of the outbreak.

“The supermarket shelves, emptied by hoarders, made me realize that for decades I have assumed that everything would always be there, that our dancing on the volcano's edge would never end," he wrote in his artist's statement.

Initially gripped by feelings of powerlessness and unable to move, partly because of COPD, a progressive lung disease he has been suffering from since the 1990s, Olaf decided to give shape to this flood of emotions through photography, what he calls, the “best therapy to solve my problems."

Featuring himself as the subject, with his dead eyes and face painted white ― a strange image of a clown in despair ― the series follows him over the course of one morning.

He pushes a shopping cart through a deserted parking lot, and faces rows of empty supermarket shelves, before eventually leaving the place and returning back to his hollow home, with only a camera greeting him.

A sense of unwanted loneliness and silence never leaves the character, whether he isolates himself at home or takes a step outside.

“What I want to say with this series is that," he said, “human beings, all together with 7.8 billion people, are stupid and arrogant We think we can rule the world. And now, see what happens."

“On the Lake" (2020) from Olaf's “Im Wald" series / Courtesy of the artist

The theme of human arrogance runs through his other recent series “Im Wald," this time with respect to nature.

Although stylistically inspired by 19th-century European Romantic paintings, he decided to forgo any color, presenting the indifferent side of nature.

Against the mountains punctuated by thick forests and water roaring down deep ravines, actors are relegated to tiny dots occupying a small corner of the image. The infinite layer of fog that surrounds them may even make the viewer miss them altogether.

The humans, however, remain blind to their own insignificance, absorbed in their own identities and activities that seem “out of place" within the pristine nature ― characterized by headphones, selfie sticks, designer handbags and bodies covered with tattoos and niqabs.

But in the end, like his many other series, Olaf leaves these images in a state of a perpetual question as imagination cannot be rendered fully into words alone.

“It's a kind of travel you make, you go into my head… You travel in my brain, you see my imagination," the photographer said of his retrospective.