Indepth Arts News:
"Ed van der Elsken: Retrospective of A Dutch Photographer"
2001-08-03 until 2001-09-23
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
As far as the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are concerned, Ed
van der Elsken was one of the great documentary
photographers. An exuberant chronicler of his times, van der
Elsken's unrestrained passion for life translated into a
rapacious, experimental photography. Enormously
respected in his native Holland, van der Elsken is little known
in Britain (certainly in comparison to American contemporaries
such as William Klein or Robert Frank, with whom he is often
compared), and this survey exhibition of his work in
photography and film, gives the opportunity to appraise his
pivotal position between pre-war street photographers such
as Weegee and Brassai, and the emotive, ultra-subjectivist
photography of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, that came after
him.
Ed van der Elsken moved to Paris in 1950, joining many
young Dutch artists and intellectuals seeking respite from the
gloomy aftermath of the war in Amsterdam. Love on the Left
Bank (1956), created during this period, remains his most
celebrated work and the one which secured his reputation in
the early 1950s. A noir novel-in-images, it follows a circle of
drifting post-war youth, young people whose lives, and
ideals, have been devastated by the war. Leading a
nocturnal, aimless existence punctuated by drink, drugs and
sex, van der Elsken's free spirits personify the restless
hedonism, and the nihilistic spirit that was to animate the
French New Wave. Most memorable amongst his subjects is
the gorgeous, vampiric, opium-addicted Vali Myers, a girl who
didn't see daylight for three years. During this time van der
Elsken was friends with Karel Appel and Cobra emigrés, as
well as leading figures in the emergent Lettrist movement
and the Situationist International, and found himself in a
cultural milieu where the mood was at once desperately
melancholic and defiantly anarchistic.
Returning to Amsterdam in 1954, van der Elsken started to
experiment with colour photography, and to pioneer a
cinema-vérité style of film-making (even inventing his own
portable movie camera), in order to produce the most
immediate, most unmediated imagery possible. The
exhibition includes excerpts from several seminal films: The
Infatuated Camera (1971) and A Photographer Films
Amsterdam, (1982), among others. He began to travel
extensively - around the world in 1959, and then regularly
visited Japan, Hong Kong and Africa. He was one of the first
photographers to realise that the photography book was a
very specific medium with its own unique possibilities, and
Sweet Life, (1966) the book which emerged from his first
global tour, is still an extraordinarily innovative publication.
As the decades pass, the mood in van der Elsken's
photography shifts from post-war despondency to the
permissive optimism of the flowerpower era, back to a sense
of tainted idealism post-Woodstock. Van der Elsken was
always in one sense an outsider drawn to outsiders. Fiercely
anti-capitalist, equally anti-communist, he was never an
ideologue. His signature images of rebellious youth -
whether Dutch rockers or Japanese 'yakuza'(gangsters) - are
driven by a sense of personal identification and celebration,
rather than social protest. Unusually for a documentary
photographer there is rarely any pretense of neutrality or
detached observation: he is always, himself, emotionally and
dramatically present in his photographs. Sometimes gentle
and romantic, sometimes shrill, vulgar, even obscene, van
der Elsken is invariably uncompromising and direct in his
approach. And never more so than Bye, (1990) his final,
valedictory film which chronicles his slow decay from prostate
cancer. He died on 28 December, 1990.
Kate Bush
Senior Programmer IMAGE:
Ed van der Elsken The Netherlands Photo Archives
Related Links:
| |
|