The Intimate Lens of Ed van der Elsken

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/arts/design/the-intimate-lens-of-ed-van-der-elsken.html

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AMSTERDAM — The Dutch postwar photographer Ed van der Elsken lived with, and through, his cameras.

They came with him into his bedroom, capturing life with his first, second and third wives; they were slung around his neck and across his chest as he traveled to Paris, Tokyo, Chile, central Africa and back home to his native Amsterdam. They joined him in his deathbed, as he recorded his own slow capitulation to cancer in 1990.

He was “a man who would have liked to have transplanted a camera into his head to permanently record the world around him,” wrote Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Marta Gili, the director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, who have collaborated to present a major retrospective of his work for both museums.

That text comes from the preface to the catalog of the exhibition, “Ed van der Elsken — Camera in Love,” at the Stedelijk until May 21, before it moves to the Jeu de Paume, from June through September, and then to the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid.

Even though his cameras were ever-present, van der Elsken’s work didn’t contain the least tinge of solipsism. It didn’t explore his personal identity — he was far more concerned with using his camera for documenting the social culture around him, especially the counterculture. His lenses captured the reckless, drug-taking bohemians in postwar Paris, the gruesome slaughter of hunted elephants in Africa, the demolition of Amsterdam’s looted and destroyed Jewish Quarter, segregation in South Africa under apartheid, jazz musicians onstage, and all forms of love — gender-bending, interracial and otherwise. He’s most famous for pictures shot in grainy, high-contrast black and white.

A 1993 review in The New York Times compared his photographic style to “aspects of Robert Frank’s melancholy romanticism with Weegee’s harsh fascination with the underside of city life”; his cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking was most associated with anthropological research.

“He was always looking for what he called ‘my kind of people,’” said Hripsimé Visser, the Stedelijk curator of the exhibition, who has studied van der Elsken’s work for 40 years. “And what he meant by that was not the beautiful people and not the famous people but the people who tried to live or to survive.”

In the Netherlands, van der Elsken is best known as one of the leading street photographers of the 20th century, Ms. Visser said, but the full dimensions of his artistic practice haven’t been widely appreciated in his home country, let alone abroad.

“Almost from the start he was also a filmmaker, a documentary maker,” she said, adding that he was often compared to people like William Klein or Jonas Mekas, “people who really didn’t film from a distance but filmed their own lives and filmed with cameras that could record in the most direct way.”

Van der Elsken began shooting photos on the streets of Amsterdam after World War II, then moved to Paris in 1950, where he worked in the darkrooms of the Magnum agency, printing for Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. In 1953, the American photographer Edward Steichen, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, selected 18 of his works for the exhibition “Postwar European Photography,” and one photograph for “The Family of Man” exhibition and book of 1955. Between those two shows van der Elsken married a fellow photographer, Ata Kando. Steichen suggested that van der Elsken turn his Paris photos into a book, which he did in 1956, blending fact and fiction to create a novel in pictures: the tale of an ill-fated love affair between a Parisian woman and a Mexican man, “Love on the Left Bank.”

In 1960, he and his second wife, Gerda van der Veen, sold everything to embark on a 14-month trip around the world. A book he made of the journey, “Sweet Life,” is now considered one of his major achievements. In 1971, like many other artists and hippies of his era, he went back to the land: in his case, a farm in Edam, the Netherlands, with his third wife, the photographer Anneke Hilhorst.

The exhibition includes about 200 prints and a dozen films, beginning with his postwar work in Amsterdam and Paris, moving chronologically as he traveled the globe and ending with the film “Bye” he made as the last chapter of his life, after he learned in 1988 that he had incurable prostate cancer. They are drawn from the Stedelijk’s collection of about 340 works, as well as an extensive archive, now owned by Ms. Hilhorst.

The Stedelijk last hosted an exhibition of its highlights a quarter-century ago, also curated by Ms. Visser, who said she “always felt that it didn’t show enough what kind of spirit, what kind of artistic attitude he had.”

The goal of this exhibition, she said, is not just to show his best images but to explore how he worked as a multidisciplinary artist.

The exhibition also includes marked-up contact sheets, sketches of the books he would later make — reminiscent of film storyboards — and some lesser-known color photographs made during the last 30 years of his life.

Although he has not been a household name, Ed van der Elsken has influenced a wide range of admirers among artists, including Nan Goldin, Anton Corbijn, Valérie Jouve and Paulien Oltheten, said Annet Gelink, an Amsterdam-based gallery owner who represents his works.

When she first discovered his images, Ms. Goldin said in an essay for the catalog, “The feeling was similar to that of meeting a lover, or of finding a brother.” She added, “So much of his work I can summon in my mind’s eye.”

While visiting friends in Edam after van der Elsken died, Ms. Goldin met Anneke, his widow, and John, her son with van der Elsken. They were so friendly and welcoming, she said, that she moved into their home for a while.

Twenty-seven years after his death, van der Elsken is still accumulating acolytes. The opening night of “Ed van der Elsken — Camera in Love” had a surprisingly enthusiastic reception among those under 30, Ms. Ruf, the Stedelijk’s director, said.

“Our impression was that his way of making life the center of his work is very appealing to a younger generation,” she said. “There’s almost a kind of revival of the ethics and values and interests of the ’60s generation, the streets, the direct contact and direct activity, and the movement of people into public life.”

Ms. Gili, in a telephone interview, said that van der Elsken’s work has a particular kind of vitality that speaks to the current sociopolitical climate. “He was making pictures in a moment of crisis in Europe, and we are also in crisis now, not only economically but in terms of social values,” she said. “He was working with social values — values he was espousing and values he was against.”

He was also using his camera much in the way that young people today snap selfies and navigate their own personal boundaries between the private and the public selves, she said.

Van der Elsken, she said, explored the “questions that arise when we begin this elimination of the walls between what we are and how the others look at us. This idea of just being permanently exposed.”