Fleeing occupied France for America at the height of World War II, Erwin Blumenfeld went straight from the New York docks to the offices of Harper’s Bazaar, where he’d been retained as a fashion photographer several years before. The unflappable editor in chief, Carmel Snow, greeted him as if he’d just been down the block for a coffee, and assigned him an eight-page rush job to be shot and printed that evening.

The dazed immigrant made his deadline and continued shooting fashion for Bazaar and then Vogue at an unrelenting pace for the next two decades, landing as many as 12 covers in a year and supplanting Edward Steichen as the world’s highest-paid photographer. He was also one of the finest, elevating his métier to an art as Steichen had done before him and as Richard Avedon would afterward. Yet his reputation, since his death at the age of 72 in 1969, has scarcely reflected his achievements. While highly sought by collectors, Blumenfeld’s photographs are rarely shown in major museums and have never been granted an American retrospective. The reasons are complex, relating both to the artist and to the era in which he lived, when his fashion shoots were ubiquitous and most everything else he attempted went unseen. After nearly four decades, the time has come for a serious reevaluation of his highly original contributions to photography, through fashion and non-commercial imagery alike.

Blumenfeld’s unconventionality is evident even in his very first photograph, which he took at the age of 10 at home in Berlin. In his memoirs, he recalls this image as “Michelangelo’s Moses, holding in its lap a half-peeled potato into which a toothbrush was inserted... standing on an open deluxe edition of Gustave Doré’s bible. On top of that, brother Heinz, wearing Mama’s spectacles and Papa’s moustache-curler, was leaning his hand on an upturned chamber pot and holding Mama’s corset rolled up in his clinched fist.” The reason for this ornate staging was to discover whether there were limitations to what a camera could capture, and the lesson learned—that anything imaginable was photographable—was the closest that Blumenfeld ever came to a systematic education in picture-taking.

In fact, he scarcely had a systematic education of any kind, having left school at the age of 16 for a tempestuous apprenticeship in the garment trade that was terminated by World War I. Sent to the front as an ambulance driver, he was summarily exposed to the unimaginable, a mixture of death and madness that he channeled into the Dada collages that he made after his discharge, while living in Amsterdam with his wife and young children. Since Dada didn’t exactly pay the rent, he opened a leather goods shop. That didn’t quite cover the bills either, owing to his incompetent salesmanship, but accidentally launched his photographic career when he discovered a fully operational darkroom behind a wall at the back of his store, apparently abandoned by the previous tenant.

Even Blumenfeld’s earliest efforts are astonishingly accomplished, all the more so given that his models were female customers coaxed into his back-room studio (and sometimes out of their clothes) instead of being sold leather handbags and gloves. His set-ups could be almost as labored as his Moses-and-moustache-curler debut, involving ladders and mirrors and shadows, and the resulting images could be nearly as fractured as his Dada collages, especially after he’d subjected them to solarization (a technique in which a negative is quickly flashed with light during the development process to give the image a halo), double exposure and all manner of darkroom manipulations. “Living Mummy” (c. 1932) is one of the finest, a full-body image of a woman wrapped in a sheet, taken from above so that her body is severely foreshortened, and lightly solarized to heighten the quality of embalmment. The technique fuses form and content, boldly making the uncanny iconic.