ED VAN DER ELSKEN “Love on the Left Bank”

venue: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present “Love on the Left Bank,” a solo exhibition of photographs by street photography pioneer and one of 20th century’s most important documentary photographers, Ed van der Elsken. Held in collaboration with Annet Gelink Gallery (Amsterdam), the exhibition will comprise 15 images included in Elsken’s first book of the same title first published in 1956 and printed by Elsken in the 1970s and 1980s.

Elsken was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1925 (he died in 1990) and began shooting photographs after World War II, when his father gave him a 9 x 12 camera. He proceeded to travel from city to city, shooting and working as a freelance photographer. Struggling from a postwar sense of emptiness and caught between the cultural poverty of the reconstruction period and hunger for a new society and culture, Elsken hitchhiked to Paris in 1950. At the time, in Paris, young bohemians from various countries gathered on the left bank of the Seine, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and lived an aimless and rough life. Living under the same roof with these young bohemians, Elsken was strongly drawn to the raffish, existentialist, and nihilistic youth culture he saw there and continued to shoot on the Left Bank for several years. The resulting images were noticed by Edward Steichen, who was then Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, while he was in Paris to conduct research for the “The Family of Man” (1955) exhibition. Under Steichen’s advice, Elsken edited the photographs into Love on the Left Bank (1956), which told a story of a young Mexican man, a stand-in for Elsken himself, and his unrequited love for Ann, who spends her life in the cafés on the Left Bank.

The strength of this book, which is structured like a story depicted in photographic images, or a photographic novel, lies in the completely convincing combination of photography as a document of time and photography as the sediment of personal involvement. (...) Van der Elsken “composed” this story out of photographs that he had taken between 1950 and 1955 while wandering through Paris. His actual subject was the feeling towards life in a generation maimed by the effects of the war and of which he was a part. In his photographs, he broke with what was in a certain sense a convention of distance in prewar documentary photography.