Ed van der Elsken – “Love on the Left Bank” (1954)

 

Dutch photographer and filmmaker Ed van der Elsken relocated to Paris in 1950. There he found a bohemian group and began closely following and photographing their everyday movements, intertwining fiction and reality in a new genre of photography book. The book focuses on the Left Bank of Paris at the time when the area was recognised as a centre of creative ferment and the home of the artists, writers and aesthetes who would determine the cultural agenda of a generation. With its unconventional, gritty, snapshot-like technique the work was acclaimed as expanding the boundaries of documentary photography.

Vali Myers, the Australian artist, featured in this book as ‘Ann’, was born in 1930 in Sydney. A self taught artist, she was already a leading dancer in Melbourne before leaving for Paris in 1949.

 

Love on the Left Bank

 

ASX CHANNEL: ED VAN DER ELSKEN

(All rights reserved. All images @ the Ed van der Elsken estate)

Posted in Gallery Feature, Highlights and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .