Long live me!, Ed van der Elsken, Foto & Film Photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More paradox

Long Live ME! investigates the relation between Van der Elsken's ways of handling photographg and film in a number of articles, varying from the first comprehensive study of his complete film oeuvre by the German/American film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, to a personal essay from his friend and colleague filmmaker/photographer Johan van der Keuken. The book also contains a complete filmography.

Long live me!, Ed van der Elsken, Foto & Film Photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More paradox

Long Live ME! investigates the relation between Van der Elsken's ways of handling photographg and film in a number of articles, varying from the first comprehensive study of his complete film oeuvre by the German/American film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, to a personal essay from his friend and colleague filmmaker/photographer Johan van der Keuken. The book also contains a complete filmography.

Reprint Jazz by Ed van der Elsken

Jazz by Ed van der Elsken ...5B4

I know I have already made my favorites list for 2007 but I do want to slip one late arrival in under the wire while we still have a couple days left. Jazz by Ed Van Der Elsken, originally published by De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam in 1959, has just been released in a facsimile edition from Karl Lagerfeld’s Edition 7L in Paris. This is one of several books that Edition 7L has created a facsimile edition of and in each case they have done so with beautiful results.

This small book, unassuming from the outside with its 6 ¾ by 7 ¼ inch trim size, reveals itself within the span of just a few pages to be a remarkable document in both photography and book design. Elsken’s small format camera and fast speed film is the perfect combination to catch the spontaneity of what is transpiring both on stage and in the crowd. Within a few frames he shifts our vantage point from passive observers of the musicians to placing us in the shoes and on stage among the players. Jumping from wide shots to extreme close-ups, the strength of the photography is its ability to be as energetic as the music.

The design, also by Elsken, is another achievement in raising the energy level. The page layouts have their own rhythms and structure that are as metaphorically musical as necessary to create a visual accompaniment that expresses the excitement felt while listening to the music. The book starts with the crowd responding to the first notes and the layout progresses in a fairly traditional way until Miles Davis steps to center stage; Elsken makes a double page spread out of a vertical photo and turns Miles sideways so he defies gravity.

Parr and Badger in their citation of this book in Photobook Vol. 1 name William Klein’s New York as a likely influence to the design. I would add that some of Elsken’s page layouts echo the John Hermansader and Reid Miles Blue Note album covers of the late 1950’s with their heavily cropped and contrasty photos of musicians emerging from the darkness. For me, one of the more seductive qualities of the book is how the difference in the coarseness of the film’s grain varies from photo to photo and becomes another element in the design.

Few of the images in Jazz escape with their original Leica proportions intact. Elsken crops the images down to their purest form and mostly for the sake of the book’s design. In one particularly creative page, Elsken splices the faces of Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge onto the same head to form a tenor sax and trumpet playing hybrid. The book ends with a sequence of Sarah Vaughn building to a final never-ending note.

The production work on this facsimile edition was done by Steidl. The original was printed in gravure and with this edition; Steidl has accomplished a beautiful faux-gravure printing that is ever so slightly silvery-blue in tone and deeply rich. The paper choice and tack sharp grain of Elsken’s photos complete the feeling of vintage gravure printing.

The texts by Jan Vrijman, Hugo Claus, Simon Carmiggelt, Friso Endt and Michiel de Ruyter along with a song list of recommended listening appear in their original Dutch. A separate thin-paged booklet of English translations sits in the endpapers.

The regular edition retails for only $30.00 which I find surprising inexpensive considering the fine quality. There is a special edition of 1000 copies also available for $100.00. This special edition is a facsimile made from an original copy of Jazz from Ed Van Der Elsken’s estate where he had written the names of all of the performers in silver ink directly onto the pages.

Amsterdamse Concertgebouw jazz foto’s ... & see also
Jazz by ...William Claxton, William Klein, Ed van der Elsken

Ed van der Elsken & Amsterdam in the Sixties

As far as the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are concerned, Ed van der Elsken was one of the great documentary photographers. An exuberant chronicler of his times, van der Elsken's unrestrained passion for life translated into a rapacious, experimental photography. Enormously respected in his native Holland, van der Elsken is little known in Britain (certainly in comparison to American contemporaries such as William Klein or Robert Frank, with whom he is often compared), and this survey exhibition of his work in photography and film, gives the opportunity to appraise his pivotal position between pre-war street photographers such as Weegee and Brassai, and the emotive, ultra-subjectivist photography of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, that came after him.
Ed van der Elsken moved to Paris in 1950, joining many young Dutch artists and intellectuals seeking respite from the gloomy aftermath of the war in Amsterdam. Love on the Left Bank (1956), created during this period, remains his most celebrated work and the one which secured his reputation in the early 1950s. A noir novel-in-images, it follows a circle of drifting post-war youth, young people whose lives, and ideals, have been devastated by the war. Leading a nocturnal, aimless existence punctuated by drink, drugs and sex, van der Elsken's free spirits personify the restless hedonism, and the nihilistic spirit that was to animate the French New Wave. Most memorable amongst his subjects is the gorgeous, vampiric, opium-addicted Vali Myers, a girl who didn't see daylight for three years. During this time van der Elsken was friends with Karel Appel and Cobra emigrés, as well as leading figures in the emergent Lettrist movement and the Situationist International, and found himself in a cultural milieu where the mood was at once desperately melancholic and defiantly anarchistic.
Returning to Amsterdam in 1954, van der Elsken started to experiment with colour photography, and to pioneer a cinema-vérité style of film-making (even inventing his own portable movie camera), in order to produce the most immediate, most unmediated imagery possible. The exhibition includes excerpts from several seminal films: The Infatuated Camera (1971) and A Photographer Films Amsterdam, (1982), among others. He began to travel extensively - around the world in 1959, and then regularly visited Japan, Hong Kong and Africa. He was one of the first photographers to realise that the photography book was a very specific medium with its own unique possibilities, and Sweet Life, (1966) the book which emerged from his first global tour, is still an extraordinarily innovative publication.
As the decades pass, the mood in van der Elsken's photography shifts from post-war despondency to the permissive optimism of the flowerpower era, back to a sense of tainted idealism post-Woodstock. Van der Elsken was always in one sense an outsider drawn to outsiders. Fiercely anti-capitalist, equally anti-communist, he was never an ideologue. His signature images of rebellious youth - whether Dutch rockers or Japanese 'yakuza'(gangsters) - are driven by a sense of personal identification and celebration, rather than social protest. Unusually for a documentary photographer there is rarely any pretense of neutrality or detached observation: he is always, himself, emotionally and dramatically present in his photographs. Sometimes gentle and romantic, sometimes shrill, vulgar, even obscene, van der Elsken is invariably uncompromising and direct in his approach. And never more so than Bye, (1990) his final, valedictory film which chronicles his slow decay from prostate cancer. He died on 28 December, 1990.
Kate Bush

Ed van der Elsken : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeySHtFEMSI