Shrouding was to become one of Blumenfeld’s signatures when he moved from Amsterdam to Paris in search of paying work, and remained crucial to his personal and professional photography to the end, binding them visually and technically despite his insistence that each stand alone. The personal works of this period, intermittently published in periodicals such as the luxurious art journal Verve, include many female nudes whose eroticism is heightened by the play of fabric against skin. He’d picked up that trick as a child on visits to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, noticing that figures such as Cranach’s nude “Lucretia” were “made even more naked and impudent by transparent veils.” Blumenfeld’s models, accordingly, might be wrapped up in wet silk or obscured by overlapping shadows, or, once captured on film, rendered translucent in their own right as part of a multi-plate print in which several different negatives were sandwiched together in the enlarger.

Hired by Vogue in 1938 with encouragement from an admiring Cecil Beaton, Blumenfeld found ample opportunity to shroud his fashion models behind lacy veils and hats, and even to render them ethereal through solarization and other darkroom treatments. While that frequently lent both garment and woman a marketable allure, Blumenfeld was equally renowned for his understanding of clothing. If shrouding had taught him about surfaces and texture, his dressmaking apprenticeship had inculcated an appreciation for the architecture of womenswear. Blumenfeld advertised this most spectacularly atop the Eiffel Tower in May 1939, when he took a series of photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives swinging from the steel girders in a summer dress by Lucien Lelong. Yet there’s more to this famous portfolio than style. Through a dynamic of structure and shadow, every photograph conjures a three-way relationship between woman, gown and edifice, each ideal form amplifying the others in shape or gesture. None is subservient, and the camera captures all as a single fabric. Fashion photography is often deservedly dismissed as mere illustration: A photographer uses a model and a setting to show off a dress. In Blumenfeld’s Eiffel Tower portfolio, the photographs are wholly self-sufficient visual statements.

Blumenfeld’s Fonssagrives is art—as aesthetically right as a masterpiece by Stieglitz or Weston or Strand—but neither he nor his contemporaries could see it in that light. (Evidently some of his contemporaries didn’t quite see it as fashion either; after the Eiffel Tower shoot, his Vogue contract wasn’t renewed, and he landed in the French and American offices of Snow’s Harper’s Bazaar for the following five years.) Especially once he found commercial success in New York, Blumenfeld’s photographic life became increasingly fragmented, and his behavior became ever more contradictory. He saw himself as an artist and boasted of his ability during commercial shoots to “smuggle in art” that would go unnoticed by philistine “arse directors” oblivious to his talents, yet he typically shunned curators who approached him, as in the case of the “Glamour Portraits” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. He bragged to interviewers that his mass-produced magazine work had more influence on life “than the Old Masters could ever have dreamed of,” but when he made selections for My One Hundred Best Photos (published posthumously in 1979) only four were from the realm of fashion.

This is historically understandable, given that “art photography” was still supposed to look more like “art” than “photography,” and Blumenfeld’s shrouded nudes more obviously fell into that category than did his commercial work. What makes those nudes interesting, though, and not mere photographic reprisals of Cranach, is his exploration of the female figure through qualities specific to photography. And these qualities, from the physics of the camera to the chemistry of the darkroom, from shadowplay to solarization, are equally to be found in his fashion photographs. For almost 40 years, curators and critics have been disturbed or distracted by an apparent schism in Blumenfeld’s work that simply isn’t there.

For the cover of Vogue in January 1950, Blumenfeld photographed the model Jean Patchett, who’d arrived at his studio sporting the darkly lined doe-eyed look of the moment. Bleaching her tightly framed half-profile in the darkroom, he reduced her visage to eye, mouth and beauty mark: The negative space of the white paper replaces her pale flesh. The picture’s graphic power—exploited by Vogue’s designers with an expert overlay of text—masks something much finer. The original print is a deep exploration of surfaces, in which the woman becomes the photograph. The convergence is absolute, the ultimate darkroom alchemy. The same is true of Blumenfeld’s body of art and fashion photography.

Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and the art critic for San Francisco Magazine.