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Short Biography
Ed van der Elsken was born in Amsterdam in 1925. He lives and works in Paris from 1950 to 1954. In this period, he lives with Ata Kando and her 3 children.
He moves back to Amsterdam and lives there from 1954 to 1971. He travels a lot for his work, for instance to Bagara, Central Africa in 1957, and makes a long world trip in1959 and 1960 with Gerda van der Veen, his second wife.Shortly after, they have two children Tinelou and Daan. During his many travels, he makes reports in colour for the monthly magazine Avenue.
From 1971, he lives in the country near Edam. In this period, he often travels to Japan and also works in Amsterdam. He is living with Anneke Hilhorst and they have a son named John. In 1998 he is diagnosed with cancer. He dies in 1990.
Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) - the 'enfant terrible' of Dutch photography - was a talented photographer and filmmaker who expressed his meetings with people in photos, photo books and films for more than 40 years. Strolling through cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Amsterdam or travelling through Africa and Japan, he preferably took photographs of striking individuals with character. His first photo book was published in 1956 Love on the left bank, which instantly made him world-famous. Some twenty photo books followed. He also made several television films, mostly about subjects regarding his own life.
The books:
Love on the left bank (1956)
Bagara (1958)
Jazz (1959)
Dans Theater (Dance Theater) (1960)
Nederlands Dans Theater (Dutch Dance Theater) (1960)
De jong & van dam nv 1912-1962 (1962)
Sweet Life (1966)
Wereldreis in fotoís (world-tour in photos) four volumes (1967-1968)
Eye Love you (1977)
Zomaar in een sloot ergens bij Edam (Just somewhere in a ditch near Edam) (1977)
Hallo! (Hello!) (1978)
Amsterdam! Oude foto's (Old photos) 1947-1970 (1979)
Avonturen op het land (Adventures on the countryside) (1980)
Parijs! Foto's (Paris! Photos) 1950-1954 (1981)
Amsterdam? (1984)
Are you famous? (1985)
Elsken: PARIS 1950-1954 (1985)
San-jeruman-de-pure no koi LíAmour à Saint Germain des Prés (1986)
Jong Nederland: 'Adorabele rotzakken' 1947-1987 (Young Holland: Adorable bastards') (1987)
Elsken: JAPAN 1959-1960 Nippon data (1987)
De ontdekking van Japan (The discovery of Japan) (1988)
JAZZ Ed van der Elsken 1955-1959.61 (1988)
Natlab (1989)
Africa Ed van der Elsken 1957 (1990)
ONCE UPON A TIME (1991)
Once upon a time (1993)
L'amour! (1995)
Hong Kong (1997)
Leve ik! (Long live me!) (1997)
Nippon data & After Ed van der Elsken (2000)
Fotografie + Film 1949-1990 Ed van der Elsken Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2000)
Eye love you Fotografies + films 1949-1990 Ed van der Elsken Fundació "la Caixa" (2001)
55 Ed van der Elsken. Text Hripsimé Visser Phaidon Press Inc. Londen (2002)
My Amsterdam Ed van der Elsken Edited by Martin Parr
Ata Kando
In the early 1960s the Hungarian-Dutch photographer Ata Kando (Hungary/Netherlands, b. 1913) travelled several times to South America. There she produced various socially engaged reportages on Indian tribes in the jungles of southern Venezuela. The territory where these Indians lived and hunted was increasingly threatened by the exploitation of the forests. Kando's photographs were shown numerous places in Europe and America. Their exhibition contributed to the international struggle against the repression of the indigenous peoples in South America. Noorderlicht is showing a selection from this series.
Kando was born in Budapest and left for Paris in 1932 with her first husband, the artist Gyula Kando. After the war she was an assistant at the Magnum photo agency. Later she married Ed van der Elsken, with whom she moved to The Netherlands in 1954. Kando initially worked for various fashion houses. In 1956 her 'Rode Boekje zonder Naam' (Red book without a title), a photo book in support of Hungarian refugees.
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger : The Photobook: A History volume 1/ The Indecisive Moment: The 'Stream-of-Consciousness' Photobook
Ed van der Elsken Sweet Life
Out of stream-of-consciousness photography emerged several distinct genres - the 'personal' documentary, the diaristic photobook, the photonovel and so on. Another was the photographic odyssey, the photographer's quest to find himself (it's generally a boy thing), the photographic version of On the Road. The epitome of this genre is, of course , Robert Frank's The Americans, but not far behind is Ed van der Elsken's epic photojourney - Sweet Life. Whereas Frank criss-crossed the United States, Van der Elsken was even more wide-ranging. Sweet Life is the result of a 14-month world trip that he made in 1960-1, covering West Africa, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, the United States and Mexico. Sweet Life was the name of a little tramp steamer in the Philippines, which makes its appearance in the book. Not surprisingly, modes of transport form one of the volume's major leitmotifs.
Van der Elsken's rationale for this freewheeling odyssey is typical Existential: 'I didn't understand one damn thing about it, except that it's enough to keep me in a delirium of deligth, surprise, enthusiasm, despair, enough to keep me roaming, stumbling, faltering, cursing, adoring, hating the destruction, the violence in myself and others.'
Although Sweet Life chronicles a journey, Van der Elsken's magnum opus has more in common with William Klein's New York than with The Americans. Like Klein, Van der Elsken designed the whole package himself, in an equally cinematic, improvisational, free-association way - there is no linear determinism in the narrative, though it does progress more-of-less logically from country to country.Like Klein, Van der Elsken brings into play a whole panoply of layout effects - double-page bleeds, crops, running pictures together and so on - and it is an unprecedented book in that a different cover for each of the seven countries in which it was published. Also like Klein's book, van der Elsken's was a big hit in Japan. His work consituted a significant influence on the young japanese photographers of the 1960s, about to be hit by the iconoclasm of the Provoke era.
Van der Elsken's words quoted above describe the tenor of the book as much as his journey. Sweet Life is a sprawing, exuberant cornucopia, a preview of the pure stream-of-consciousness, machine-gun approach that would soon come with the japanese Provoke aestetic, Van der Elsken's work has its dark and pessistic undertones, although in Sweet Life bold, frantic energies predominate.