Anuschka Blommers / Niels Schumm

From the Rietveld Academie to Self Service—Why Two Credits Became One Name

Niels Schumm graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 1995, and Anuschka Blommers in 1996. According to an interview with Stof, Schumm first studied architecture before moving into photography, attracted by the camera’s ability to arrive directly at a result; Blommers came to photography through dressing and photographing friends and through her father’s darkroom^*2. While they were students, Schumm, one year ahead, helped Blommers with technical questions and her graduation work; after graduation, each began assisting on the other’s shoots^*2. At Self Service, Schumm initially handled still lifes and Blommers portraits under separate names. As “photography” and “lighting” credits began switching between them from one assignment to another, distinguishing whose photograph was whose became increasingly meaningless, and they adopted a single joint credit^*2. Blommers’s interest in directing people and Schumm’s interest in constructing objects and space converged in the shared studio.

From Bourdin to Goldin and Teller—How Fashion Photography Changed in the 1990s

Fashion photography had been moving between commercial and artistic languages long before Blommers and Schumm. The V&A describes how figures such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton foregrounded narrative, sexual tension, and character in the 1970s, beyond the straightforward presentation of clothing, while the style and youth magazines of the 1980s developed alternatives to polished advertising aesthetics^*20. MoMA’s Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 addresses a period in which interaction between art and commercial photography intensified, bringing both cinematically constructed scenes and the snapshot-like aesthetics associated with Nan Goldin and Juergen Teller into fashion magazines^*19. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum similarly notes that the 1990s saw photographers and independent fashion and culture magazines exceed the conventional task of showing clothes attractively, allowing the photographic image itself to carry a broader sense of contemporary life^*21. Blommers and Schumm entered precisely this editorial environment, where commissioned fashion work no longer had to function only as product description. Instead of adopting a rough snapshot style, they concentrated on sets, light, and the placement of objects, using the precision of commercial studio photography to produce perceptual error^*2.

Physical Illusions That Exist Only from the Camera’s Viewpoint

Blommers and Schumm’s photographs can resemble digital composites, but Foam’s studio visit shows how often they physically arrange everyday objects, paper, glass, and bodies so that the scene becomes another image only from the camera’s position^*3. In an interview with the Nieuwe Instituut, Schumm speaks about constructing physical illusions far enough to make clear that they are not Photoshop effects; the accompanying account describes a process in which light and sets are carefully prepared while the number of exposures is reduced^*9. The reason photography is necessary is specific. Objects and bodies that remain separated in three-dimensional space can share contours and lose their depth relations when projected through a lens onto a single plane. Photography can fix a misreading that belongs to one viewpoint as a final two-dimensional image. Because the image is produced through a real set and the camera’s projection, everything depicted can have physically existed while its depth, scale, or function remains easy to misread.

“Fashion Is Something We Use”—Treating Clothing as Material, Not Subject Matter

In an interview with the Nieuwe Instituut, the artists explain that they are less interested in communicating fashion itself than in treating fashion as something they can “use”^*9. This is not a rejection of commercial work; it describes their treatment of clothing as visual material. Clothes, models, styling, and magazine layouts carry established conventions for making bodies appear attractive, youthful, and desirable. Keeping those conventions in place while making a pose awkward, exchanging a face for an object, reversing orientation, or photographing a still life as if it were a portrait exposes how fashion images teach viewers to read bodies. Their interest in turning photographs upside down, discussed in the Stof interview, similarly tests what determines an image’s “correct” orientation rather than using inversion as novelty alone^*2.

Why Beauty and Disorientation Remain in the Same Image

They refine lighting, skin, clothing, and backgrounds to a high degree, then introduce slight inconsistencies in contours, depth relations, or the apparent function of objects. Wallpaper* presents Mid-Air as a retrospective in which the seduction of fashion photography remains inseparable from unease^*10. Duel Magazine likewise emphasizes images whose apparently perfect surfaces are held in suspension by small mismatches^*17. Foam’s press material describes Mid-Air as the duo’s first major solo exhibition^*5, while The Ravestijn Gallery traces a career spanning fashion magazines and art exhibitions through reproductions of their work^*6. They do not abandon commercial finish in favor of an anti-advertising roughness. Instead, the polished image itself becomes difficult to resolve. The critical tension comes from the precision of fashion photography rather than from an external gesture of refusal.

How the Collaboration Works—Concept, Casting, and Technique in Constant Exchange

Their shared authorship grew from the practical work of assisting one another until roles began to overlap. In the Stof interview, they describe developing ideas together while Blommers often takes more responsibility for casting, models, hair, and makeup, and Schumm more often handles technical execution^*2. The Agents Club likewise presents their work as a collaboration spanning concept development, set building, and photography^*13. The exchangeability of still life and portrait, photography and lighting, that characterized their early working relationship remains visible in the images. Objects are treated like people and bodies arranged like still lifes; categories of subject matter and divisions of labor both resist becoming fixed.

Anita and 124 Other Portraits—Re-editing Magazine Portraits as a Photobook

Anita and 124 Other Portraits gathers 125 portraits made between 1997 and 2007. Valiz explains that the subjects are placed in alphabetical order, separating the photographs from their original editorial settings, while an appendix reproduces the magazine layouts in which they first appeared^*7. ARTBOOK likewise presents the publication as a re-editing of ten years of fashion photography and other portrait work into a single volume^*12. In magazines, the photographs were read in relation to clothing, personalities, articles, and advertisements. In the book, they become a sequence of portraits. The structure demonstrates how a change of editorial medium can change what a photograph means.

More—Turning More Than Twenty-Five Years of Editorial Photography into a Visual Archive

Roma Publications’ More condenses more than twenty-five years of work into 240 pages, placing fashion, portraiture, still life, and autonomous work in the same visual flow^*8. A Japanese presentation by Book of Days likewise emphasizes the constructed nature of the images—all elements are captured in-camera—and the movement between commercial styling and independent work^*18. The book re-edits editorial assignments themselves as a long-term body of work. As commissions made for different contexts meet across page spreads, the recurring method becomes visible: bodies treated as objects, objects treated as bodies.

Self Service and the Magazine Page—Photographs Whose Meaning Is Made in Sequence

The duo have worked continuously for fashion magazines, including Self Service. The archive of issue 8 confirms that their photographs circulated within editorial culture in the late 1990s^*14; their continued participation in issue 9 shows the magazine functioning as a repeated site of experimentation^*15. A project with the magazine presented by Et Caetera demonstrates how the work operates through sequences of pages, relations between figures and blank space, and the interaction of clothing and type, rather than through isolated prints alone^*16. Libraryman’s A Day in the Life of... similarly shows their sustained use of the book as a medium organized by sequence^*11. In magazines and photobooks, neighboring images, text, and page order can alter the meaning of the same photograph. Editing is part of the work’s structure, not merely a stage that follows the shoot.

Using Commercial Precision for Illusion—Disrupting Fashion Photography from Within

To place Blommers and Schumm in photographic history solely as fashion photographers whose work entered museums would fold them into a much broader crossing of fashion and art since the 1990s. The Brno Biennial describes their field as a “gray zone” where fashion, art, and photography overlap^*1. Foam’s retrospective likewise refuses a firm separation between editorial commissions and autonomous work, showing how the same working methods have operated across both for more than twenty-five years^*4. As MoMA’s account makes clear, fashion magazines had already absorbed both cinematic staging and snapshot realism by this period^*19. What distinguishes Blommers and Schumm is their decision to keep the even lighting, exact sets, and smooth rendering of skin and objects cultivated by advertising photography, then use that clarity to generate illusion. An apparent face resolves into an object; something that seems to be falling turns out to be a fixed set. The commercial demand to make things legible and attractive begins to work in the opposite direction. Their specific place in photographic history lies less in a general collapse of the boundary between fashion and art than in redirecting studio techniques designed for clarity toward perceptual uncertainty.

Making the Image In-Camera in the Age of Digital Compositing

Once digital compositing became commonplace, the production of strange images ceased to be unusual in itself. Blommers and Schumm’s insistence on physical sets and a single camera viewpoint keeps a specifically photographic problem in play. Foam explains that the strangeness of the final image comes from the relation between the camera’s viewpoint and what was physically placed before it, rather than from post-production manipulation^*3. The method does not use the absence of digital alteration as proof of truth. It demonstrates the opposite possibility: even an unmanipulated exposure can make reality appear radically different through arrangement and viewpoint alone. This is why photography, rather than image-making in general, remains necessary to their critique of bodies, commodities, and desire in fashion imagery.