In his portrait photographs Amsterdam-based artist Erwin Olaf plays games with the idea of cold reality versus cruel artifice. His recent imagery is based on American aristocracy in the early 1960s. It blends journalistic details with staged emotions. In Grief, Olaf's latest series currently on show, solitary figures brood in tearful silence, capturing that precise moment when innocence, hope and joy were all lost. Nothing is as it seems and in Erwin's recreated world, nothing is real. "Grief is a series about the choreography of emotion, and what you can create in the studio," says Erwin Olaf. "The more realistic that much art photography is becoming, the more I try to create an artificial version. Realism in photography can be just as artificial as realism in the world outside. So I wanted to ask the question: how does grief really look? What is the aesthetic of grieving? In my portrait of Grace, even though you don't see her face, the way she is standing with her head tilted, how she looks out the window, the way the handkerchief is crumpled in her hand, tells a story. It's the same as when you watch a movie. You might start to cry, even though what you see is fake." Text by Jonathan Turner for Tableau Fine Arts Magazine