I Am

A career-spanning survey of the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, published by Aperture for his sixtieth birthday and running from his earliest black-and-white work through his celebrated staged color portraiture.

Presented chronologically across 400 pages, the book traces four decades of Olaf's evolution from provocateur to sought-after portraitist. It pairs early monochrome images with the meticulously staged, cinematic color tableaux that made his reputation, and closes with a previously unpublished series shot in Shanghai. Olaf's own wry commentary runs alongside the plates, glossing the contexts and inspirations behind individual series. Additional text comes from Rijksmuseum photography curator Mattie Boom, with an interview by Laura Stamps. The volume accompanied the largest retrospective of Olaf's career, a multi-venue exhibition opening at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, and Fotomuseum Den Haag in February 2019 before traveling internationally.

Olaf (1959-2023) built his reputation on highly art-directed, theatrical portraiture that treated fashion, advertising, and fine-art photography as a single continuous practice. He addressed taboo and social constraint through lush, controlled studio tableaux. His work earned the Johannes Vermeer Award, a Lucie Award, and the commission to design the portrait side of the Dutch euro coin. This survey followed two earlier Aperture monographs, Volume I (2008) and Volume II (2014), which chart the same body of work in narrower slices.