Over four decades, Dutch post-war photographer and filmmaker Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) photographed the bohemian youth of Paris in the fifties, sought out the ‘authentic’ men and women in his native Amsterdam and in the streets of Tokyo and documented the tribal rituals and magical figures in the remote villages of Central Africa. The resulting images and films are an intimate, poetic ode to the countercultures, to the lost generations and to those on the fringes of society.
Ed van der Elsken retrospective: Exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Paris
Seventeen years after his death, Jeu De Paume, Paris is showing a comprehensive retrospective of Ed van der Elsken’s diverse body of work. The exhibition ‘Ed van der Elsken – Camera in Love’ features more than 150 original prints, later colour prints, film excerpts and slideshows, montages and book dummies, contact sheets and other archival documentation taken over four decades.
The main focus of the exhibition is on the photographs that Ed van der Elsken made in Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo, during his travels in Africa and while on a world tour with his wide in the 1960s. Photographs from his 1956 book Love on the Left Bank, contact sheets, book dummies, earlier publications and filmed memories of the protagonist Vali Myers are among the highlights of the show. His other remarkable books, including Bagara, Jazz and Sweet Life offer wonderful insights into his conscious and subjective approach to photography.
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Van der Elsken’s films, excerpts of which are on show at the Jeu de Paume exhibition, are realistic and documentary in nature, often experimental in form and characterised by the presence of the filmmaker himself. The exhibition also includes his slide shows, particularly Eye Love You and Tokyo Symphony, a posthumously completed ode to the city he loved and visited many times.
The exhibition ‘Ed van der Elsken – Camera in Love‘ was previously on view at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and after Jeu de Paume in Paris, will move to the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in 2018.
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