Remsen Newbold Wolff

a.k.a.

Vivienne Blum

New York, April 6th 1940 - New York, August 18th 1998

Born the only child of the celebrated artist Isabel Bishop and neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Harold G. Wolff, Remsen Wolff — who would eventually call himself Vivienne Blum — inherited his mother’s aesthetic eye and his father’s intellectual talent. He graduated in art history at Harvard University in 1963, he married and had two daughters. After his divorce, he traveled extensively throughout the US and Europe, photographing people in public spaces. In 1985, the State of Texas mistakenly accused him of being a serial killer, whereupon he received compensation, making him an instant millionaire.

The settlement was around a million dollars. Roughly half of it was secretly redirected into what became the largest analog archive of trans identity ever created in a single artist's hands — the studio time, the film, the lab work, the model fees, and the cibachrome and baryta prints that now sit in the Vintage section of this site. The archive is what Remsen did with the money.

His financial independence allowed him to photograph the subjects of his choice, without the need to sell his work. Wolff photographed individuals from marginalized communities — Black, Hispanic, Jewish and LGBTQ+ people — whose experiences struck a chord with his own quiet struggles. He approached his subjects with a rare combination of modesty, integrity, and empathy.

He considered traditional masculinity inherently damaging

5.98 Viv Blum

You, man; you, masculine being
Would you, if you could become Captain, President, King?

I, in the lightness of my freedom now
choose happily to give myself

— as though receiving

delightful, stolen goods —

the title & the dress

of she.

His early street photography reveals he recognized loneliness in people, which confronted him with his own sense of belonging. He, too, was part of a minority, grappling privately with questions of gender and identity. Wolff’s upbringing had been shaped by his relationship with his domineering, racist father, which instilled in him a rejection of masculinity: “men kill, men go to war, men suppress their wives”; he considered traditional masculinity inherently damaging. This drove him to seek out softer, more complex representations of strength and self hood. Through his work, armed with a camera, he found an expression of solidarity and a mirror to his own feelings.

Being photographed by Remsen Wolff has meant a lot to me

Wolff became fascinated by the performance artists Klaus Nomi and Lypsinka in New York. In his younger days there had been very few role models out in the open, so eventually he sought them out himself, which made it easier for him to connect with like-minded people. Or, as an Amsterdam drag queen photographed by Wolff would later put it: “Back in the day it was difficult to get information. You really thought you were the only one. [Being photographed by Remsen Wolff] has meant a lot to me.”

Wolff’s love for feminine males led to his extensive series Special Girls — A Celebration, an art project featuring around 130 sitters: transgender people, cross-dressers, drag queens and female impersonators from Amsterdam and New York, whom Wolff photographed extensively from 1990 on and cost about $ 500.000. The project would ultimately comprise over 100,000 photographs of people who belonged to this subculture, which he was never really a part of himself.

Self-portraits

Particularly poignant in his work are Wolff’s self-portraits, captured consistently over four decades. They expose inner conflicts and his search for community, revealing his struggles with identity and gender through evolving styles and emotional tones. Early self-portraits appear exploratory, reflecting a more constrained or fragmented sense of self. Later self-portraits reveal greater fluidity and confidence, as well as discomfort, as Wolff increasingly accepts — and sometimes seems to reject — himself.

Throughout his nearly-five-decade career, Wolff was known as "Remsen," "Rem" and "Aram." In his diaries he referred to himself as a “phony transsexual” and “die R” — “die” as in the German feminine article: “die Frau.” At times, possibly during spells of self-doubt, he called himself Mr Ridiculous or Mr R. In the years before Wolff decided to leave this world, he went by the name Viv Blum.

His humor stands in contrast to the darkness he wrestled with

Baroness & Anthony Wong, New York, June 10th 1990 Vintage Cibachrome

Despite a life marked by regular periods of depression, Wolff’s sense of humor brought levity to his work and life. Often subtle and sometimes self-deprecating, his humor stands in contrast to the darkness he wrestled with. His final years were characterized by more severe depressions; suffering from agoraphobia, failing to seek recognition by the art world, and the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer contributed to his taking his own life in 1998. He entrusted his entire archive to his Dutch assistant, photographer Jochem Brouwer.

Relevance today

Remsen Wolff’s photographic archive is not just a personal record; it connects to larger cultural and social currents that continue to shape discussions on identity, gender, and belonging. By documenting his personal experiences meticulously in his notebooks, Wolff’s work helps fill gaps in the historical record, offering representation for those whose stories ended prematurely during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and for others whose stories have been erased or overlooked, including — foremost — that of Wolff himself.

Wolff’s perspective enriches current discussions about repression and tolerance, offering vital lessons for today. His images and life work advocate acceptance and equality, challenging stereotypes, resisting to stereotyping and toxic power dynamics at a time when public figures use their platforms to reinforce harmful norms and undermine the rights of non‑hetero normative people. Or simply go to war.

                                                     12.97

         - Viv's Jrnl -                    

IT's GOVERNMENTS DECiDE WHEN IT'S MORAL To KiLL

The major religions — So many differences!

There's one point at least they all agree on: if your country’s, government — Communist, Fascist, Democratic, Other — orders men to go kill members of a desig- nated group of people (includ ing women and children) the response is - Go! Yes!

The Remsen Wolff Collection

The Remsen Wolff Collection is based in Amsterdam. It holds his negatives, vintage prints, transparencies, and Polaroids, diaries, and poetry manuscripts. Roughly half of the photographic archive consists of street and travel photography. The other half consists of Wolff's series Special Girls — A Celebration, created between 1990 and 1996. The focus of these c. 100,000 portraits of female impersonators is not on the deviant or the extreme, but on the persona. The viewer is not a voyeur who sees freaks, but looks at self-confident women who are captured with a loving, admiring eye in beautifully stylized portraits — printed perfectly on cibachrome and baryta paper.

The collection today

Between 1990 and 1996, with a final session in 1998 with the model Ivé, Remsen Wolff photographed roughly 130 transgender and gender-nonconforming people in New York and Amsterdam — more than 100,000 analog images, made in the last window before everything went digital, and almost none of which have ever been seen. The work was made by a Harvard-educated son of the American Realist painter Isabel Bishop, who spent half a million dollars and nearly five decades on a love letter to a marginalised community, and whom the world never noticed in his lifetime. He sought recognition, and never received it. The FOAM exhibition in 2020 was the first significant showing of the work — twenty-two years posthumously.

Stewardship of the archive has passed to Jochem Brouwer, who began as Remsen's eighteen-year-old studio assistant in 1990, is himself a sitter in the archive, and was at Remsen's bedside in August 1998 — by then Remsen was living as Vivienne Blum, the name she used in her last years. The Estate of Remsen Wolff has been closed; the photographic and literary archive is held privately and worked through one image at a time. It is, by now, a time capsule of a world that no longer exists — both technically, in that nothing on this scale could be made on film again, and politically, in that the climate the work is being released into is not the climate it was made in. The mission is straightforward: to make Remsen Wolff's work as visible as the work deserves to be, and to honor a deathbed promise.

If that’s what you think

                           of me

All that you think of me

— thankful for this

                        clarity —

then it’s an obvious

                   Goodbye.

                         1.97