Photographer Profile: Oliver Schwarzwald

From a start in food photography, German photographer Oliver Schwarzwald has expanded his range to create fantastical still lifes and landscapes for fashion editorials and ads for top clients like IKEA, Davidoff, Martell and more. Carol Cooper meets the refreshingly sunny surrealist

Since the Manifesto Of Surrealism was published by poet André Breton in 1924, surrealist visual artists have been wandering in the hypnagogic hinterlands between our conscious and unconscious, exploring themes of madness, dreams and sexual ecstasy.

These wanderings have resulted in such images as melting clocks, sliced eyeballs and men with apples for heads, which can – depending on how much coffee/sleep/absinthe you’ve had that day, along with the general state of your mental health – provoke responses ranging from a jaunty chuckle, through a vague sense of unease, to the outright screaming abdabs.

Though much of Oliver Schwarzwald’s works can be described as surreal – Dalí, Magritte and Duchamp were early inspirations – he is definitely at the jaunty chuckle end of the spectrum and would never wish the screaming abdabs on anyone. He’s just too nice.

The Hamburg-based, married father-of-two lists Man Ray and Guy Bourdin as his favourite surrealist photographers, but whereas they both often depicted distorted or disconnected female body parts, Schwarzwald shuns such darkly sexual iconography. His work radiates a light and whimsical glee, with any disembodied parts seeming just happy to be roaming free from the tyranny of the body, onto the pages of such publications as Loved&Found, Le Figaro and Stern.

Disparate objects tend to wander into his landscapes, too. Hurdle, which appeared in the East Wing Biennial exhibition in London’s Courtauld Institute of Art this January, features a ping-pong table bearing bright pom-poms inexplicably placed in a misty field.

A yearning for the bigger picture

Born in Gdansk in Poland in 1973, Schwarzwald moved with his family to Germany when he was two. He always wanted to be a photographer. “Art and sports were my favourite subjects at school, but maybe I was led to photography because I wasn’t a very talented painter. Photography appeared to me as an accessible medium.”

It’s hardly surprising his work leans towards the conceptual rather than observational, as he has always had a philosophical bent. “School was not a fun time for me. In history you had to learn all these recent details and dates, but I always wanted to see the big picture – from cavemen to modern times.

With maths, I questioned what it was good for, why should we learn it? It put me off doing any further study.” Instead he learnt on the job by spending four years as a photographer’s assistant; his most significant mentor being the Danish photographer Mads Madsen, who helped him marry his two loves – photography and cooking. “When I first got into photography I was interested in fashion or journalistic styles. I’d look at work by Jeanloup Sieff, Richard Avedon and Sebastião Salgado.

I hadn’t thought about food photography, though I loved to cook and even thought of becoming a chef. But I realised that a chef’s working life was not for me. I was a shy and sensitive teenager and couldn’t have coped with stressful kitchens. Then I met food photographer Mads, who took me to a food shoot and I thought ‘Wow – you can take pictures and talk to chefs about food!’ I wanted to learn all I could.”

It was Madsen who helped him learn about the creative process. “He taught me how to work up a concept, how to properly research your idea, to prepare shoots and always try to find a new way. He was so inspiring. We would be like kids playing around with ideas, having fun.”

Fun does come across loud and clear in his work – his landscapes as well as his still lifes often hint at some mischievous narrative that’s told in a palette of bright or pastel colours against a light background. Even those of his compositions with a darker palette maintain the playful tone; some pay homage to the vanitas still life paintings that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.

This genre was influenced by the region’s prevalent Calvinist ideology and encouraged the viewer to consider mortality and reject depravity. The sombre works would contain objects, such as a skull, that symbolised the inevitability of death and decay and the vanity and pointlessness of earthly pleasure and material gain.

Schwarzwald has reinterpreted the genre, giving it his own sunny spin. “In all my work I like to tell a story, to convey a message, and in my ‘spray paintings’ the spray-painted blobs stand for the skull in vanitas art – but I wanted to turn the idea around and create symbols of life and happiness.”

He’s not averse to a little ironic vanitas, though: in a fashion editorial for German magazine Stern he’s popped in a cheeky peeled lemon – a symbol of both the bitterness of earthly beauty, but also a luxury item it was vain to desire. “Lemons were used in vanitas paintings to encourage moderation. Obviously, I had to include it in a picture about fashion luxuries!”

I ask him if he always starts his work with a planned concept or if he ever goes out with a camera to seek ideas. “Sometimes I snap things I like when I’m out with an iPhone. But I do need a certain idea to start taking photographs. I write down my inspirations in a sketch book. Ideas are like friends, you have to treat them with respect or they’ll go away!” He’s such a thoroughly good bloke, he’s even kind to his own ideas.

The bearable lightness of being

For a recent personal project, The One Euro Sculptures, he’s created sculptures from three items, each worth just one euro, the idea being to sell prints of the sculptures on eBay and give the money to charity.

He’s also working up a three euro project: “In Germany, welfare allows just three euros a day to feed a child, which I think is ridiculous. Before making a fuss about this though, I want to find out, in a rational, objective way, what is actually possible within this budget.” A rational approach for a man whose work is so in touch with the irrational.

He is adept at working in such a variety of styles, I ask him how he sees his commercial work developing in the future. “I like working with people who want to develop a certain look or a language and not just do an ordinary job to sell a product. I suppose I’m still naive to think like that, but I do love my profession. As long as I’m still doing still life photography, I’ll be happy.”

Schwarzwald and I were communicating over Christmas, and in one of his emails he didn’t just wish me Season’s greetings, he wrote: “I wish you a happy new year, full of joy, sunshine and health!” One hopes that someone as gleefully good-hearted as him will always find happiness and success.