Early on in his photography career, Dutch artist Erwin Olaf photographed male models wearing ladies’ hats. In one of these black-and-white images, Hennie (1985), a nude male model leans into Olaf’s frame, staring directly at his implied audience. Atop his head is a velvet, wide-brimmed black chapeau. The model’s androgyny and eccentric sartorial choice aside, it is the plasticity of the image that keeps the viewer looking. Olaf marshaled all the specificities of the image—the model’s subtle pursed lip, his downturned and shadowed left shoulder, the determination of his gaze and the angle of his posture—with a deft neatness and scrupulousness.

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The Ladies Hats series was one of the first collections in which Olaf played with über-artificiality, and it would be his unique brand of precise........

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