Ed van der Elsken was not only an influential Dutch photographer, but also a filmmaker of the first order. By 1955, at the age of 30, he had already gained some international recognition, particularly in the United States.
Hot-tempered, van der Elsken stubbornly lived for photography and developed a creative path that was both egocentric and geographically and thematically diverse. Although his interests led him to record the lives of outcasts around the world, he was never limited to this subject. Other subjects, approached with empathy and irony, were documented by his cheerful but truly inquisitive personality: I look at you. How lovely you are. How lovely you were. All your fun. All your misery. I picture. There are things I got to tell you. I prod you in the ribs. I grab you by the arm. I yank your coat-tails. I say, d’you see that? Dammit!
Fabulous! Unbelievable! Super! Or. Filthy bastards!
Dirty dogs! What a lousy squirt! They should pass a law…D’you see that! Look at them! Jesus, I’m alive. (van der Elsken 1966)
Born in Amsterdam in 1925, van der Elsken lived and grew up there until 1944. Wanting to become a sculptor, he attended the Institute for Applied Arts Education (1943). Fearing that he would be sent to work in Germany, he fled to the south of the Netherlands, where he went into hiding. After the liberation of Arnhem, he joined the Allied forces until the end of the war.
His formative years (1945-1950) were marked by early recognition by his peers. While attending a preparatory course for film operators, he thought he could make a living as a photographer.
To this end, he took a correspondence course at the School of Professional Photography in The Hague. The fact that he failed the exams did not stop him from absorbing the lessons, as he also assisted professional photographers such as Ad Windig in Amsterdam. Van der Elsken also photographed his home town and a trip from Paris to Marseille (1949). As a result of these early photographic achievements, he joined the GKf, the leading Dutch photographers’ organisation, in the same year, where he also benefited from the support of Kryn Taconis.
Taconis belonged to the GKf and was associated with Magnum Photos in Paris. When van der Elsken decided to go to Paris in the summer of 1950, he arrived with Taconis’s letter of introduction in hand. Pierre Gassman, the addressee, ran Pictorial Service, a leading photo laboratory that worked for Magnum Photos, and employed him. It was there that he met the photographer Ada Kando, whom he married in 1954. After six months, however, he left Pictorial Service and began photographing the lives of some of the people he had met. This group of young bohemians was not the only subject he photographed; many images echoed Parisian street life, comic urban scenes and his daily life in Sèvres with Ada and their children (1950-1954).
However, this group was the main subject of his first book, Love on the Left Bank (1956), published with the strong encouragement of Edward Steichen. He had met Steichen in 1953. Steichen, the head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, also showed his pictures in two of the most important exhibitions of the time: Postwar European Photography (1953) and The Family of Man (1955).
For Love on the Left Bank, van der Elsken composed a love story between Ann and Manuel in the form of short texts, followed by a series of images of varying dimensions that gave rhythm to the sequence. One of the last images in this visual narrative shows Vali Myers, alias Ann, kissing a mirror: van der Elsken knew how to depict sensuality.
After returning to Amsterdam and divorcing Ada (1955), van der Elsken began a life of intense travel, working on photo books and reportages for Vrij Nederland, De Volkskrant and Het Parool. Amsterdam, its neighbourhoods and its musical life were not neglected. In Jazz (1959), his Chet Baker in the Concertgebouw illustrates how van der Elsken obtained
achieved very dark, high-contrast and coarse-grained images. It also shows his shift towards the use of a Leica 35mm camera with a telephoto lens.
Van der Elsken travelled with Gerda van der Even, whom he married in 1957. Soon after, he accepted an invitation from Gerda’s brother, an anthropologist, to go to a small village, Banda, in French Equatorial Africa. His photographs of communal life were published in Bagara (1958).
He and his wife also travelled around the world for 14 months (1959-1960). They visited Sierra Leone, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico and the United States. The book Sweet Life (1966) contains his pictures and comments on each place. In these images, van der Elsken demonstrates how his photographs are able to create an emotional connection between the viewer and his subjects. In Durban (1959), which shows a bench ‘for whites only’, van der Elsken reveals another skill: his cunning way of using visual irony to denounce how absurd a situation can be. As Sweet Life took a long time to be published, and disappointed by the difficulties of taking the project forward, van der Elsken gave up photography for five years after 1962 to concentrate on filmmaking, an activity he had begun in 1955.
A new shift in his career followed his move in 1971 from Amsterdam to the more rural Edam where he lived with his family on a farm. As the 1971 award-winning film De Verliefde Camera, van der Elsken worked in the 1970s on a private record of his rural life in both film and photography. Photographs of his son Daan (1975) or his horses Pravda and Fidelito (1978) illustrate these interests. His penchant for intimacy was also evident in the slide exhibition Eye Love You (1977). Published in colour, the exhibition catalogue was a celebration of love, all kinds of love: images of couples, love scenes or pregnant women mixed together.
These personal works were supported by his intense activity as a photojournalist: between 1967 and 1980, van der Elsken published photo reportages in Avenue and other Dutch magazines (e.g. Margriet). This led him to travel again to Africa, Southeast Asia and South Asia. In South Asia he reported on the terrible floods in Bangladesh in 1974. His treatment of the tragedy, published in Avenue in 1975, was an exception to his established way of photographing: for the first time he confronted the viewer with a clear vision of grief.
Between 1979 and 1990, van der Elsken concentrated on editing and publishing books containing the photographs he had taken throughout his life, both in the Netherlands and abroad. De ontdekking van Japan (1988) was a special case. It emphasised his fascination with the country that had impressed him most during his international travels.
Another Southeast Asian experience, in Korea (1988), was short-lived as he was diagnosed with cancer. This would become the main theme of his last film, Bye (1990), in which he filmed his illness. His last film illustrated another strand of his work from the 1980s: a focus on photographing and filming his own life, his life on the farm, and his rekindled love for Anneke Hilhorst, whom he had married in 1984. Until the end, Ed van der Elsken followed his motto: ”Laat zien wie je bent! (Show us who you are!).
