Ed van der Elsken - Camera in love
The Stedelijk presents the largest overview of the photographic and filmic work of Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) in twenty five years.
Ed van der Elsken was a Dutch street photographer and filmmaker who became known to the general public with the photo book Love on the Left Bank (1956). Van der Elsken is considered the most influential Dutch photographer of the 20th century.
Van der Elsken started photographing in the late 1940s. Like many of his contemporaries, Van der Elsken moved to Paris in the early 1950s, which was the epicentre of arts and culture at the time. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés Van der Elsken came across a group of bohemians whose lives on the fringes of society he meticulously documented in the photographic novel Love on the Left Bank. This book already contains many characteristics of Van der Elsken's later work. His stage was the street, and he had penchant for eccentrics and people at the bottom of society.
Thanks to his sense of humour and an open mind, Van der Elsken was able approach and relate to the most diverse people, ranging from the slightly uncomfortable teenage twins he encountered at Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt, to a kissing couple in Marseille and the Yakuza gangsters in Tokyo. Thanks to this open-minded and bold approach, Van der Elsken managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly. In fact, het captured it so well that his work still receives a lot of attention today. Van der Elsken also had the talent to record exactly what he was looking for, if necessary he directed the scene on the spot.
From the late 50s onwards, Van der Elsken used the entire world as his stage. In 1959 he set out to tour the world, visiting Japan, the US, Malaysia, the Philippines and Mexico, among others. The journey resulted in the book Sweet life (1966), which Van der Elsken had compiled and edited by himself. Initially, Sweet life was only a hit in Japan where it was connected to the work of Japanese contemporaries. Today, the stream-of-conscious book with high-contrast black-and-white photos is considered a masterpiece and a highlight in Van der Elsken's oeuvre.
By the end of the 1960s, Van der Elsken exchanged Amsterdam for the nearby village of Edam and started working in colour. Something that was not done among photographers at the time. It resulted in the books Eye Love You, Hallo! and Avonturen op het Land. At the time of The discovery of Japan (1988) he had switch back to black and white film again.
Annet Gelink Gallery is currently showing his work in the online only exhibition "On the Road Again" on Gallery Viewer.