Lust for Life

Ed van der Elsken in Colour

LUST FOR LIFE

Ed van der Elsken in Colour

Short Circuit in Colour

Birgit Donker

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Colour photography always used to be a little suspect. It was disparaged as being too vulgar, too commercial. Fortunately, we know better now. Look at the photos in which Ed van der Elsken celebrated life, and you will see what you would be missing without colour. The sensation you get is similar to what he said right before he died: ‘Life is so beautiful that heaven has long since shot through every bit of it.’

Over 42,000 of Ed van der Elsken’s slides passed through the hands of restorer Katrin Pietsch and her colleague Lénia Oliveira Fernandes during a large-scale restoration of his colour work.

When asked what had particularly struck her about that, Katrin Pietsch answered: ‘The pictures he didn’t use. They show how he circled around his subject.’ Whereas a photographer like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Koen Wessing would usually get a perfect shot right away, Ed van der Elsken was greedier; he took more shots that missed the mark. But the one photo he ended up with was then extremely special.

Ed van der Elsken used the technique of circling as a way of making contact with the people he was photographing, in order to control what happened next. He was looking for that one specific moment when they would react while he was attracting their attention by sticking out his tongue at them or calling out something. And then it was: ‘Click. Bye. And I’ll probably never see them again,’ as he wrote in his unparalleled book, EYE LOVE YOU. This was how Ed van der Elsken created his own definitive moment and captured it for us, his viewers. That definitive moment can then produce the effect of a ‘short circuit’, as curator Frits Gierstberg calls it, an apparent contact between the viewer and the person in the photograph, without the intervention of the photographer. ‘We see with his eyes, receive the look that was meant for him,’ writes Gierstberg in this book. This ‘short-circuit effect’ works even better in colour than in black-and-white because colour evokes more of a sense of transparency, as if you were there yourself.

The fact that we can still see Ed van der Elsken’s colour slides today, and can continue to do so in the future, is thanks to the more than two-year restoration project undertaken by the Nederlands Fotomuseum to remove mould from the slides. This extensive recovery operation is a convincing example of how important it is to invest time, attention and resources in the museum’s valuable collection. A large part of the Netherlands’ photographic heritage is stored here. Photographers like Ed van der Elsken have captured our collective memory in photographs. ‘Ed has an unerring instinct for signs of the times,’ writes arts specialist Joyce Roodnat in her

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book Hee… zie je dat? The films of Ed van der Elsken (‘Hey… Do you see that? The Films of Ed van der Elsken’). ‘What everybody else considers “normal” and doesn’t even notice, he records. Everybody was there, but he saw it.’ Which just goes to show that while everyone can take photos, that doesn’t mean that everyone is a photographer.

And then there’s another special aspect in his photos. Not only what Ed van der Elsken shows, but also how he shows it gives a portrait of an era. Just look at how free these pictures are, with an attitude that you have a perfect right to be an individual. Today, in this age of increasing prudishness, some of these pictures could no longer be taken. How lucky we are that he was there to capture what nobody saw. And how promising that his colour pictures now have been saved for the future.

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‘I sing the praises of life, that’s all there’s to it. However, I do sing the praises of everything: of love, courage, beauty, but also of fury, blood, sweat and tears.’

Ed van der Elsken, De verliefde camera, 1971

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‘But what I’d really like is to have a tiny camera built into my head with a highly sensitive microphone and then very consciously watch and record everything 24 hours a day.’

Jan Bosdriesz, documentary Ed van der Elsken 1925-1990, 1996

Portrait Ed van der Elsken, 1971 Photo: Dick Coersen/ANP

Ed van der Elsken and the Colourful Other

Frits Gierstberg

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Summer, sun, Saint-Tropez. CLICK! His light blue shirt hangs open; he rests his right hand lovingly but also a bit self-consciously on her shoulder, a semi-embrace. She wears a hip, flesh-coloured vest with a beautifully embroidered neckband, wide open at the front and fastened at a single point with a tiny bow, her left breast half visible; a cigarette in one hand and a baby who stares at us uninhibitedly in the other. Two broad smiles. Their three bodies form a double, overlapping letter ‘V’, proclaiming they are one. It is the V of Venus, good vibes, vacation and perhaps also varicoloured.

EYE LOVE YOU, says the photographer, drawing those words in varicoloured letters above their heads. Then he’s off again. That’s Ed for you.

Cover of EYE LOVE YOU, 1977

The colourful other Ed. The frequency with which people use Ed van der Elsken’s first name when speaking about his work is striking. After all, in international photography we never hear about a ‘Henri’ (Cartier-Bresson), an ‘Anton’ (Corbijn) or a ‘Martin’ (Parr). Whereas an artist is usually referred to by his or her last name out of a certain respect, with Ed it is ‘Ed’. In this case, however, it does not indicate a lack of respect but a mark of honour that in the Netherlands has otherwise only been conferred on Rembrandt and Vincent. Even many years after his death in 1990 it is still ‘Ed’, which says a lot about the extent to which Ed van der Elsken has been embraced by his audience. It also shows how the work and persona of this photographer have over the course of time converged – or perhaps become mixed up with each other.

1 Evelyn de Regt, Once Upon a Time (Amsterdam: Fragment, 1991), p. 24 and note 34. For the writing of this essay, I have gratefully made use of this excellent biography.

This convergence of photographer and work has been noted more often about Van der Elsken, particularly in connection with his portraits of people on the street who react to the photographer’s domineering presence. Like a hunter, Van der Elsken would often see his prey from afar and approach cautiously, meanwhile choosing the right position and right lens. Sometimes he made a whole series of photos before getting the perfect shot. Once he had made contact with his subjects, he would challenge them to react but stayed in charge of what happened at the same time. He himself once put it this way: ‘I’m not just anybody when I’m out on the streets. When I’m taking pictures… well, I’m somebody who’s very much there, somebody who has command over ten square meters or a hundred square meters. I’m the boss for a while. That’s become my specialty.’ 1

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The Mould in Ed van der Elsken’s Slides

Loes van Harrevelt Katrin Pietsch

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‘Some of my negatives have become a little mouldy over the years.

Because while I have always lived picturesquely, it hasn’t always necessarily been dry and free of mould. I actually think all those scratches on a photo make it look rather distinguished, like the craquelure on an old painting. That way it looks like real art.’ 1 Ed van der Elsken wrote this next to one of his photographs laced with mould in his photobook Amsterdam (1979). Leafing through this book of black-and-white photos, you immediately notice hyphal threads running through more of them.

People were by no means always aware of the disastrous consequences of mould in photograph collections, and if they were, they lacked the proper means, manpower or methods to put a stop to this deterioration. Keeping them cold and dry was the only option.

This is what the Nederlands Fotoarchief (as of 2003, Nederlands Fotomuseum) has done in Rotterdam, where Ed van der Elsken’s black-and-white negatives, colour slides, an extensive collection of letters and documents – and later the entire contents of his darkroom as well – have been stored since 1993. Until then, his sizable archive had been kept in his house, situated in watery environs on a dyke in Edam. Fluctuations in temperature and high humidity are conducive to the development and subsequent spreading of mould.

Complete image, from left to right: Ata, Thomas, Madeleine and Juliette Kandó and Ed van der Elsken (in mirror), Paris 1954.

Top: Slide before cleansing, with mould covering the entire surface. Bottom: Slide after cleansing (digitally edited).

1 Amsterdam! Oude Foto’s 1947-1970.

Ed van der Elsken (‘Amsterdam! Old Photos 1947-1970’), Bussum (Van Holkema & Warendorf/Uniboek BV, 1979/1988), p. 95.

2 With the adoption of digitisation around the turn of this century, the presence of damage and mould became more visible in slides and negatives.

3 Compared with earlier colour procedures (such as autochrome), the colour rendering of a slide came close to the reality perceived by the human eye, although different films had their own specific colour characteristics.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum has always made Ed van der Elsken’s archive fully available for use in publications and exhibitions. The climatological conditions in its depots (3 degrees Celsius and 33 percent relative humidity) ensure that further degradation due to mould is kept to a minimum. Around 2001, when the slides were examined more closely for mould, it turned out that a great number of them had nevertheless been affected.2 In order to prevent further spreading, the slide archive was packed up and stored separately from the rest of the collection. Every now and then, a slide would be cleaned and digitised. With an archive of some 42,000 slides, however, this incidental approach was just a drop in the ocean.

Despite the optimal climatological conditions, mould was continuing to erode the rest of the archive, with irreversible damage as the result.

Colour positive film, commonly known as slide film, is a direct positive procedure, which means that once it is developed, you get a positive image with a colour rendering.3 Depending upon the technique or slide film used, colour rendering can differ tremendously, as can be seen in the great variety of colour slide films in Ed van der Elsken’s archive. He worked on this archive continually. As soon as a developed slide film of 36 or more photos came back from the lab, he would select, classify and

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Biography Ed van der Elsken

Frits Gierstberg

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1925

Ed van der Elsken is born in Amsterdam on the 10th of March as the second of three children. His father owns a modern home-furnishing store; his mother is a homemaker. Both are members of the SocialDemocratic Workers’ Party, SDAP.

1937

Van der Elsken goes to trade school but wants to be a sculptor. In his free time, he apprentices at Van Tetterode, a stonecutter’s yard in Amsterdam.

1953

In Paris, Van der Elsken comes in contact with Edward Steichen, an American photographer and photo conservator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichen selects a number of his photographs for exhibitions in New York, including The Family of Man exhibition, which begins travelling around the world in 1955 and arrives at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1956. The pre-printed heading on his contact sheets from this period reads, ‘ed van der elsken – paris – photography in colour and black-and-white’.

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1943

He enrols in the Kunstnijverheidsschool, an applied arts institute that is the precursor of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.

1944

After a year, he decides to focus on sculpture. To avoid labour conscription in Germany, which is obligatory for young men, he goes into hiding in Bergeijk, in the province of North Brabant. When he comes across the dead bodies of German soldiers on the road after the Battle of Arnhem on 17 September, it makes a deep impression on him. After the liberation of the southern Netherlands, he works as an interpreter for the allies, volunteers for the mine clearance service and follows a training programme in Belgium for defusing bombs.

On seeing an issue of the British photojournalistic magazine Picture Post for the first time, he cuts out photos by Bill Brandt and Kurt Hutton, among others, and makes collages with them.

1947

Van der Elsken discovers Naked City, a book of photo­ graphs by the American photographer Arthur Fellig (‘Weegee’) and is so impressed that he decides to become a photographer himself. He works in various photography stores and takes a correspondence course on photography at the Fotovakschool, a professional photography school in The Hague, but does not finish it.

1949

After a ballot, Van der Elsken is accepted as a full member by the professional photography society GKf, where he is in the company of Emmy Andriesse, Eva Besnyö, Carel Blazer and Cas Oorthuys, among others.

He is dissatisfied with the situation in the Netherlands, however, and following in the footsteps of many other artists, poets and writers, he moves to Paris. There he finds work in the darkroom of Pictorial Service, where he prints the work of Magnum Photos photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ernst Haas. This is where he meets his first wife, the photographer Ata Kandó.

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Ata Kandó and Ed van der Elsken get married on 26 June in Sèvres, near Paris. Kandó has three children by her ex-husband, who had returned to Hungary.

Previews of Love on the Left Bank appear in Picture Post and Wereldkroniek. Van der Elsken publishes a colour photo for the first time, as part of a pictorial story accompanying an article by graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer in the trade journal Drukkersweekblad en auto-lijn. Schrofer’s article is about the emancipation of photography and the birth of the ‘photo novel’.

Parallel to that, Van der Elsken presents a fictionalised photo version of his life in Paris with Ata Kandó and the children. In the years that follow, Van der Elsken works often and closely with Schrofer on what will later become his most famous books of photography in black-and-white.

1955

The family moves to Amsterdam; this same year, Van der Elsken and Kandó divorce. Van der Elsken has a solo exhibition for the first time, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Together with journalist and cineaste Jan Vrijman, he undertakes his first film project, about the nuclear research institute in Geneva, CERN.

1956

Ed van der Elsken’s first book of photographs, Love on the Left Bank, is published in three languages simultaneously. The book, presented in the form of a photo novel, is based on photos that Van der Elsken took of a group of young dropouts who hung around in Parisian cafés at night. It makes Van der Elsken internationally famous in one fell swoop. Love on the Left Bank was published entirely in black-and-white.

A number of portraits in colour from his Paris period, which he shot on 6x6cm slide film, have also survived.

Interestingly, in one of the dummies for this book, Van der Elsken experimented with a colour portrait of Vali Myers on the cover (see p. 40).

Ed van der Elsken loved photographing people. His main subject was what people made of life and what life did to people. His photography is an ode to a varicoloured mankind and life itself.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Ed van der Elsken became world famous for his black-and-white photography, published in a range of photobooks. But, because he was looking for a way to record life as directly as possible, he also liked to work in colour. At the time, that was still unusual and publishing colour photos was prohibitively expensive. In any case, it took a long time for a real appreciation of colour photography to develop – Van der Elsken was so far ahead of his time that he did not live to see it.

This book is the first ever major overview of Ed van der Elsken’s colour work, with a title that expresses his unbridled energy and enthusiasm: Lust for Life.