Ed van der Elsken had little interest in the expected path. He became a photographer almost by accident and spent decades photographing the people who interested him, whether they happened to be Parisian young bohemians, Japanese gangsters, Amsterdam street kids, or, eventually, his own dying body.
Walking through the vast retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, “Ed van der Elsken: Up Close”, it is hard not to think about freedom. Not freedom in the grand political sense, but something smaller and increasingly rare: the freedom to drift, to reinvent yourself, to ignore the approved route through life. Van der Elsken recognised that impulse wherever he found it because it defined his own life too. He liked to present himself as a free spirit who answered to nobody. The exhibition reveals a more complicated figure. Beneath the swagger was a photographer who was endlessly curious, deeply ambitious and, at times, surprisingly vulnerable.
Lens flair: Ed vander Elsken’s self-portrait, Auto-Polaroid, taken in the 1970s.
Van der Elsken was born in Amsterdam in 1925. Having initially trained as a sculptor, he turned to photography in his early twenties; a copy of Weegee’s Naked City changed everything. Published in 1945, the book’s unflinching photographs of New York’s night-time streets, crime scenes and ordinary lives convinced Van der Elsken that photography could be as raw, immediate and alive as the city itself. He later insisted he hadn’t been influenced by anyone, yet he bought the same Rolleiflex camera Weegee used and, years later, painted the photographer’s portrait on the side of his car.
In 1950 he hitchhiked to Paris. His first job was printing negatives in Magnum’s darkroom, handling the work of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson before deciding he would rather make his own photographs than process other people’s. Living in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with the Hungarian photographer Ata Kandó and her three children, he found himself among artists, drifters and outsiders rebuilding their lives after the war.
That world became the subject of Love on the Left Bank (1956), the book that made his name. Usually described as a portrait of postwar Paris, it is equally a portrait of a way of life that feels increasingly difficult to imagine. Van der Elsken’s young bohemians move between cafés, rented rooms and doomed love affairs, held together by friendship, improvisation and very little money. Looking at the photographs now, what feels most distant is not the clothes or the cigarettes but the sense that time itself moved differently. The cafés still exist. Paris is still full of young people hoping to become artists. Yet the conditions feel different. The people in Love on the Left Bank seem to inhabit a world where failure, wandering and long afternoons remain affordable.
We often talk about bohemia today as though it were an interior design style, a look sold back to us through expensive hotels, coffee shops and fashion campaigns. Van der Elsken’s photographs remind us that it was once something else entirely: a way of living, precarious and often chaotic, but sustained by cheap rents, endless conversation and the belief that art might matter more than certainty.
Among the figures who populate Love on the Left Bank is Vali Myers, the kohl-eyed Australian dancer who became the inspiration for Ann, its unforgettable, fictional central character. Van der Elsken was captivated by her. While the book presents itself as a love story, it is also an act of myth-making, blurring documentary and fiction in ways that feel surprisingly modern. Real people appear in carefully arranged scenes. Events are reshaped. Van der Elsken rarely draws a clear line between observation and invention, and seems perfectly happy leaving readers to wonder where one ended and the other began.
This approach caused problems. No American edition appeared, thanks to its depictions of hashish use and interracial relationships. British publishers softened the ending, replacing venereal disease with homesickness and a longing for Mexican cooking. Yet what once seemed controversial now feels remarkably contemporary. Long before photographers openly questioned the idea of documentary objectivity, Van der Elsken was already exploring the uneasy territory between truth and storytelling.
Paris was only the beginning. Over the following decades he travelled widely, producing books inspired by journeys in Central Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong and Japan. He returned repeatedly to Japan, becoming close to photographers such as Eikoh Hosoe and photographing everyone from Yakuza gangsters to sumo wrestlers. He spent decades documenting Amsterdam before retreating to a farm near Edam, where cows, horses and vegetable patches became subjects too. By the end of his life he had amassed more than 42,000 colour slides.
On paper, those subjects have little in common. In the photographs they feel entirely consistent. Van der Elsken was drawn to people living outside conventional expectations. He once described his favourite subjects as “young, rebellious scum”, a phrase that sounds provocative until you realise how much affection lies behind it.
We live in a culture that encourages constant self-presentation. Careers are planned. Personalities are curated. Success is measured and displayed. Van der Elsken gravitated towards people who seemed uninterested in any of that. They were often chaotic, impractical and occasionally self-destructive. Some paid a heavy price for living that way. Yet they were trying, however imperfectly, to invent lives on their own terms. Van der Elsken was fascinated by those lives because he recognised something of himself in them.
The irony was that fashion paid the bills: Dior, Chanel and Schiaparelli all commissioned him while publishers showed little interest in the work he cared about most. Van der Elsken never made peace with that compromise. The photographs he believed in were the ones he made for himself, and the gap between commercial success and artistic fulfilment took its toll. Friends spoke of periods of deep depression.
One of the pleasures of the Rijksmuseum exhibition is that it pays as much attention to process as to finished photographs. The museum acquired Van der Elsken’s archive in 2019, after it had been cared for by his widow, Anneke Hilhorst, since his death in 1990. Contact sheets, notebooks, unfinished mock-ups and handmade books sit alongside the celebrated photographs, revealing someone who was never content simply to make pictures. He obsessed over sequencing, pacing and design. A page from 1954 combines photographs with drawings, fingerprints, wax seals, stamps and handwritten notes. The photograph, for Van der Elsken, was only the beginning. The book was where the work became complete.
Looking at these objects, it becomes clear that his idea of bohemia shaped the way he worked as much as the people he photographed. He distrusted prescribed methods, ignored neat categories and preferred to invent his own. Even his books resist easy classification, hovering somewhere between documentary, autobiography, fiction and diary.
The exhibition is equally good at puncturing some of the mythology Van der Elsken built around himself. A profile written in 1954 describes a shy young man, almost boyish, too trusting and easily hurt. It sits awkwardly beside the image he later cultivated of the fearless adventurer. Yet perhaps that contradiction is the point. The swagger and the vulnerability coexisted. One protected the other.
The exhibition also catches how funny Van der Elsken could be. In one photograph, a street performer strides through Paris traffic with a café chair and top hat hoisted above his head, while a policeman at the edge of the frame appears to be deciding whether the spectacle itself counts as an offence. In 1971, Van der Elsken printed a press card declaring himself a member of the International Brotherhood of Rather Honest Reporters. Laminated, stamped and ringed with little stars, it looked just official enough to be absurd.
Towards the end of his life another kind of honesty emerged. Diagnosed with incurable cancer in 1988, Van der Elsken turned the camera on himself and made Bye, an unsparing film about his final years. The scans, the operations, the anger, the fear and, eventually, acceptance became part of the work. The photographer who had spent decades examining other people’s lives documented his own with the same directness.
His influence has travelled much further than his name. The American photographer Nan Goldin has spoken about opening Love on the Left Bank and feeling she had found a predecessor. Like Van der Elsken, Goldin dissolved the distance between photographer and subject. She photographed the people she loved, the communities she belonged to and the lives she was living rather than observing from the outside. Van der Elsken helped make that kind of intimate, emotionally entangled photography possible.
Ed van der Elsken also understood that freedom came at a price. Many of the people he photographed lived difficult, insecure lives. He knew that better than most. Perhaps that is why these photographs still feel so alive; they remind us that a life does not always have to move in a straight line. The Paris of Love on the Left Bank may have gone. The cheap rooms have disappeared. The cafés are more expensive. Yet the impulse that runs through the photographer’s work remains recognisable: a refusal to accept the life laid out in front of you.
[Further reading: Photo essay: George Orwell’s late sanctuary]
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This article appears in the 05 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe's shame
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