Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf

The Dutch have always been strange people. Creatively weird. While the artists of the Italian Renaissance painted their joyous bodily Madonnas, boldly placing them in the center of the canvas, the Dutchman Jan Van Eyck created the "Madonna of Chancellor Rollin". Austere, pensive, dressed from head to toe, placed in the corner of the picture. Or the famous Dutch breakfast buffet of the 17th century. With crabs, with blackberry pie, gloomy. Well, or Rubens with his ladies of very magnificent forms. And everywhere, almost always, paints in dark tones.

Erwin Olaf is also Dutch. Let him be a photographer, let him be in the twentieth century. He was born in 1959. In his works, there will still be far from delicate colors and absolutely not easy plots. And he is also strange. And the topics are strange. Erwin Olaf is shocking. He probably does not hide the fact that his task is to stand out. And if he films about women, fashion, beauty, there will be no beauty. One cannot say nicely about his work. Rather repulsive, disgusting. Not without magnificent bodies, which were widely presented by him in the series of photographs "Mature Ladies". This is where it is worth remembering that beauty is a terrible force, and the eternal striving for it is even more terrible. In fact, it is better not to look at these photos at night, as well as photos of his famous series "Victims of Fashion". Photos of completely naked people with bags of fashion brands on their heads. Complete anti-glamor. And the king is naked, as the author says, and not even in his head, but on his head only thoughts about fashion are, nothing else, emptiness.

Frankly, his only series, which is really interesting, and not just shocking, defiant, is the series "Royal Blood". Kings, rulers of this world are known to be mortal, often violently mortal. This series also features Lady Diana, with the emblem of the car in which she set off on her last journey, imprinted on her arm, and Marie Antoinette with her own head in her hands, and Julius Caesar, and the last Russian empress Alexandra Fedorovna... This series is interesting for its presentation. It is not so much frightening as vacuum, silent, quiet. All the victims are simply in white, on a white background, and all of them: Caesar, Lady Di, and Louis XVI are absolutely alike and absolutely ... white. And on this white there are only red drops of blood and red eyeliner of blue eyes. All of them seem to be an exact repetition of each other, but in different faces, but with the same ending. And if the author wanted to show not living, dead and completely artificial, completely repulsive beauty, then he succeeded. However, all of Erwin Olaf's works are not about beauty, they are about ugliness, behind which there is a struggle for eternal beauty.