On June 3rd, 2021, ARTCaffè had the honor to host Erwin Olaf as a guest speaker. Being an admirer and a collector of his work, it was indeed a treat for me to listen to him describe two of his latest series, "April Fool" and "Im Wald."

Losing this great master in 2023 was a shock.

As I am reviewing the material to upload on this website, it came natural to me to go back to this event, whose memory I will always cherish as one of the highest moments at ARTCaffè.

This brief introduction is followed by the transcription of the talk. My purpose in publishing this text and the recordings at the bottom of the page is to preserve the many insights he gave us that day. Remembering the generous and open way he talked about his practice, those two series, and more.

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Erwin Olaf: When the pandemic started in 2020, I was on a long holiday after two big shows. We started seeing articles about a new virus, and my husband and I flew back to Amsterdam, where we live. I've got a lung disease, I'm a bit vulnerable, and my doctor had warned me that I was at risk if I got COVID. That first week, when everything in the Netherlands was rapidly closing down, constantly reading the papers, listening to the radio, and watching television started making me scared. I was wondering what was going on, and there I was, at 61, totally paralyzed by my fear. The phone stopped ringing, no emails were coming in. My whole studio, me and the six people I worked with, were just sitting and waiting, wondering what was going to happen.

One day, I was in a supermarket, and many young people were surrounding me, rushing and grabbing food. There was a kind of plundering going on. Because my breathing is not good, I couldn't move. The strange thing is that unhappiness or negative situations can be an enormous source of inspiration for an artist. I went home and thought that, before going crazy, I had to translate my feelings into my work. I often use my own photography as a therapy to accept facts in life. That experience gave me the idea to make a series named “April Fool,” both because we were close to the beginning of April and because I thought we are all fools. We, as human beings, think that we can be so arrogant towards nature, but in the end, the tiniest virus grabs us by the balls. At that moment, a virus was telling us that we had to stop. If you go too far, you travel too much, you are too greedy, and you're ruining your planet. That was the message to me. Which is why I saw myself and the people around me as fools.

I'm a very slow photographer. When I have an idea, before it's translated into pictures, it takes most of the time at least three months to organize and get our crew together. But because of the pandemic, on a Wednesday evening  I had this vision, and the day after, in the studio, I told Shirley [Erwin Olaf’s agents,NDR], We have to do something, we have to pull the car out of the mud. We have to start again. She called everybody the following Friday morning, because a total lockdown had already been announced for the Saturday. We didn't organize a lot; we just had some friendly supermarkets that wanted to help us after closing time. The rest was already like you see it in the pictures. The parking lot, for instance, was as empty as you see it now. And if you look at the offices in the background, there was no light except for the fire light.

Nobody was at work. Everybody was already at home.

This was the atmosphere we shot in the series. The pointed hat was the translation of our stupidity. Maybe you don't know, but in the beginning of the 20th century, when children were called stupid, or weren’t good in school, they had to wear these white pointed hats and stand in the corner of the class. They were punished like that. With the white face, I translated the emotion I felt at that moment, an emotion I had never felt before. I didn't want to talk about me, but about a man getting older and about this totally new situation that he couldn’t handle—a totally new emotion of panic and fear. Therefore, I only used white to translate my face in a general face. I didn't want to communicate a clown. It was more the translation of being totally empty. The empty feeling of fear.

We started in the morning, and finished late at night. I called a newspaper, we asked for publication, and we sent it, of course, to the galleries. I thought nobody would have understood. But the funny thing was that even though I tried to translate in this series a very private feeling, in order to get myself out of panic, “April Fool” was understood by many people.

The phone started to ring again, emails started to come, people started to communicate again. And I got out of my fear. I could move, work, think again, and I slowly started to accept that the situation had changed.

In general, you have to read "April Fool" like a comic book. It is a story, and the title of each picture is a time in its timeline. A month later, I thought there was still something missing. By then, we had more experiences, having being locked up in our homes. Hence, I added a three-channel video work in which you see the man being locked up in his home, working endlessly like a mouse in his cage.

Let’s now move on to “Im Wald,” which means “the forest”. I was invited to Germany due to a big exhibition at the Kunsthalle München. The director wanted me to see a hunting place from King Ludwig II. As you know, Germany had a lot of little kingdoms before it became Germany. One of those kingdoms was Bavaria, and in the second part of the 19th century, it was ruled by King Ludwig II, who was a very interesting and tragic figure. He was gay, slowly getting crazy, and was spending all the money of the kingdom on art, architecture, and music. He was the one who discovered Richard Wagner, and he was his biggest protector. Without Ludwig II, we wouldn't have had Wagner. King Ludwig II is also an icon, and I didn't want to burn my fingers with it.

We went to beautiful woods, saw fantastic mountains and little lakes, and the place was dark and sinister. This special hunting place didn't give me any inspiration right away, but when I came back, there was a seed planted in my head, even though I still didn't know what to do with it. Besides, at that point, I had photographed in Berlin, Shanghai, and Palm Springs, telling a story about three cities in transition, and to me, that was a close chapter.

When things started to slowly opening up again, we had to go back to Munich. That trip gave me the idea to photograph only in the nature. I didn’t want to see any houses or any interference by humans. I only wanted to see our position within nature. Where are we, and how much do we think about ourselves? Aren't we tiny? There are 7 billion people in this world. We are a plague; we are everywhere; we are traveling everywhere. We think we can do and explore everything, that we can build everywhere, but that's not true. We have to learn to start respecting nature again.

So, I decided that I wanted to photograph the non-emotion of nature, opposite to us, arrogant human beings. If you look at many classic paintings from the romantic era, there's a huge difference compared to how we perceive nature today. When Germany was blossoming in the 19th century, there were a huge number of romantic paintings that had a different quality and different kind of atmosphere compared to Dutch painters. They were my inspiration. It was rather difficult for me, in the past, to fully understand this world of painting in Germany until I went into the woods there, and I realized that that was the emotion I wanted to translate into my work. I went back to black-and-white photography. I love black and white because it is already surreal, since theworld is not black and white.

‍My projects never start with portraits. They always start with the situation. I will give you an example.

Take “Auf dem See,” the picture of the two ladies with the boatman in a boat on the lake. One day, I was having my breakfast in a very international hotel in Munich when, in the room, entered a mother with two daughters. The mother was dressed in a niqab, a traditional clothing from the Middle East. It was hilarious because in the same breakfast room, you also had German people dressed in very traditional German clothing. In one little room, there was already a whole spectrum of the world. From the very beginning of the casting, it was very clear to me that I wanted to cast people from the real world. Nowadays, it's so different from 30 years ago. Everybody travels and is everywhere, which makes our lives much richer. It is a very dynamic time; we get much more influence from each other.

There is a very famous and symbolic painting from the end of the 19th century by Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, which is called ”The Island of the Dead.” Well, my picture “Auf dem See” is a translation of this incredibly successful and iconic painting. I saw the woman with her daughters, I saw the lake, and then, with this painting in my mind, I had my idea and I wanted to do something with that.

Of course, I also needed a boatman. When I do castings, I usually give general directions about what I want, and to me, the boatman had to be a young, strong man. I saw hundreds of pictures of young, strong men, but most of them were too beautiful, too 'modellin'. Then, I saw the picture of this guy, a 24-year-old boy, completely tattooed. This gave me the idea: it was so clear tome that wearing a niqab or being totally tattooed like this boy were the same thing. He was also wearing a niqab, because we could only see his eyes. The niqab is playing with your identity, and completely tattooing yourself means also creating a new person, in a way. Matching those two characters together in this picture was, for me, a happy coincidence. It gave it an extra layer, a new dimension.

Once you have the first picture in a series, then you can deepen your idea. As I said before, I always have first to make the story, and then I can make the portraits. I can’t work the other way round. Besides, the people we choose really have to act, like good actors. They have to become the mother in the boat, or the boatman. Otherwise, despite how beautiful the lake is, how fantastic the boat is, the picture will be bad. The people are not models anymore. They become the mother, the boatman.

With the first idea, I could go on with the project. The only thing I didn't want was sunlight, because I hate sunlight in black-and-white photography. So, we had to work very early in the morning. Back then, I didn't know that, but the magic of the German Alps is that you see a lot of fog every morning. That was so beautiful and translated well into the whole series. Nowadays, I try touse less and less Photoshop, which is why there was only one shot, followed by a beautiful translation to black and white.

“AmWasserfall” is one of the last shots we took, at the Krimml Waterfalls in Austria. For years, I was intrigued by the paintings of the American artist Thomas Eakins, active in the mid-19^th century. In particular, by “Swimming Hole”, a very natural and romantic picture. For a long time, I wanted to do something with that, to reshoot it, but with my inputs, and with people with a darker skin color. “Am Wasserfall” turned out totally different, in a way, but still has a reference to Eakins.

Besides, I wanted to create something with a waterfall, because of the power of water, its beauty, its absence of emotion. For instance, waves won't stop for you, they will drown you without any emotion. Or, this waterfall will break your neck without any emotion. I wanted to create this picture with a group of people that could be tourists, or friends, taking a bath. This picture, for me, is a riddle as well as it is for you. Together with the influence by Eakins, when I saw this waterfall and the stones that were so dark and wet, I was also inspired by the statues of Giacometti, by his figures emerging from the floor plate.

We got to the spot, and decided the point of view the day before of the shooting. The next day, though, the wind totally chianged, water was spraying on the lens, so I had to pull away my camera until I didn't have water drops anymore. This shot came out much better than my original idea: even though I am not a religious person at all, I felt it had now a reference to the source of everything, .

I wanted to have a girl as the leader of the pack. And the leader is the one who's the first to point at something. It’s a cliché, and I like the photography to play with clichés. So, I told her to point at something, and the funny thing is that she pointed at the spot that in my head was the beginning of everything. Besides, if you zoom in, if you go very close, in the back, you can see two men on the rocks. I asked one of them to take a photograph without telling him what he had to photograph. In the final picture, if you draw a line from her finger and his camera, you will see that they go to the same point, even though we didn't communicate at all.

As a maker, getting that coincidence of the wind, which made us change points of view, and that of the actors, who point in the same direction, was for me a magical moment. That combination gave me my second or third layer, making “Am Wasserfall” one of my sweethearts of the Im Wald series.