Erwin Olaf is a Dutch multidisciplinary artist born in 1959 in Hilversum. He is mainly known for his highly polished and stylized photography. Working exclusively with a Hasselblad camera, he creates entire sets to compose atmospheres and worlds out of his fantasies.

He started his career as a journalist and after a trip to Paris where he met the work of Pierre and Gilles or Yves Klein, he fell in love with art. The cinema of Visconti, Antonioni and Pasolini was also a great influence for him as well as the Neue Deutsche Welle and the work of Werner Herzog and Fassbinder.

Later on he was introduced to the famous choreographer Hans Van Manen who showed him the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel Peter Witkin or George Platt Lynes. This is when he started to build his own knowledge and took it as a root to his own style.