Ed van der Elsken

For forty years, the Dutchman Ed van der Elsken travelled the world, creating his artistic life´s work: photographs and documentary films as an authentic and yet highly personal testimony of the sixties, seventies and eighties. A pioneer of a kind of photography that takes a radically subjective stand, an approach which since the eighties has become known to a broader public through such artists as Wolfgang Tillmans, van der Elsken from the very beginning embraced an unrelenting openness and directness that did not exclude his own private sphere. From the classic A Love Story in Saint Germain des Prés in the form of a photographic novel to the series Jazz and the video show Tokyo Symphony or the last documentary self-portrait of the severely cancer-stricken Ed van der Elsken - the artist´s pictorial worlds are always of a haunting immediacy and authenticity. More than 140 illustrations in duotone and color and numerous essays by renowned international authors present an elaborate and equally personal portrait of the "filming photographer" and his oeuvre. The artist: Ed van der Elsken (Amsterdam 1925-1990 Edam). After studies in sculpture, Ed van der Elsken decided to become a photographer in 1947. His international breakthrough came in 1956 with his book "A Love Story in Saint-Germain-des-Prés". He received numerous awards, among them the Dutch national award for film in 1971 and the David Roell Award for his complete oeuvre in 1988. In 1997, Ed van der Elsken was represented at documenta X at Kassel.