Ed van der Elsken

Roberto: "Unhappiness became a style of life. Misery, decay was our beauty. Sadness was normal. 'Les feelers du mal'. Flowers sprouting from mud and dung." From: Ed van der Elsken, 'Elsken: PARIS 1950-1954', Japan Tokyo, Libroport Co. Ltd., 1985 When he was twenty-four, Ed van der Elsken left Amsterdam, where he was born and bred, for France. He lived in Paris for the next four-and-a-half years. 'Much of my time in Paris was spent in Saint Germain des Pres, where I'd met a group of young people whose outlook and lifestyle appealed to me. They were sombre and disillusioned, despondent and completely withdrawn within themselves. On the one hand they were fed up with the rest of the world, with society, with everyone else; on the other, they were all screwed up with their own problems. Passive, gloomy, melancholy - it all had real class, they weren't just a bunch of beatniks bumming around I hung around with them for years, was part of the group, although I had sufficient detachment to record it all. I must have shot thousands of pictures, living in the cafes for days and nights on end, week and months, never really stopping to think about what was going on, I was too involved for that." From these photos he wal later to compile his book 'Love on the Left bank' (1956). 'The group used to revolve around a girl called Vali Myers, an Australian girl with heavy black eye make-up, she was a sort of mascot for the group. She appears in a lot of my pictures.' Paris 1952 - Ed van der Elsken in 'Once Upon a Time', Amsterdam 1992, p.2