The Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken (1925-90) shouldn’t be notably well-known outdoors of his native nation, however inside the Netherlands—and in Japan, his second house—he’s a legend of road images. His pictures and brief movies of Amsterdam life within the Nineteen Seventies, specifically, have woven themselves into the town’s iconography.
In 2019, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam teamed as much as purchase Van der Elsken’s full work archive, and now the Rijksmuseum will current one of the complete exhibitions of his work thus far, Ed van der Elsken: Up Close. The present, sprawling throughout 9 galleries, will monitor the self-taught photographer’s inventive profession from 1948 to the very finish, together with pictures he took in Japan for his photobook De ontdekking van Japan (the invention of Japan) whereas he was dying from prostate most cancers.
The exhibition will current a few of Van der Elsken’s most well-known pictures—reminiscent of his Beethovenstraat, Amsterdam (1967), capturing three ladies in miniskirts crossing the road, and Woman on a Bicycle (1983)—and likewise present guests with detailed insights into his artistic course of, by means of contact sheets, unpublished letters, notes, e-book designs and movie fragments. Many of those have by no means been exhibited earlier than.
Focusing on course of
“The exhibition is almost completely derived from the work archive with a few loans from museums,” says the curator Hinde Haest. “We follow the key moments in his career: when he starts trying something new, or he starts experimenting with extreme contrast in the darkroom, or when he starts working in colour.”
There have been a few main retrospectives of Van der Elsken’s work in Amsterdam over the previous decade. The first was on the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2017 and the second was on the Rijksmuseum in 2020. The emphasis on this exhibition can be on the photographer’s course of, Haest says, to offer the customer the impression that they’re “looking over his shoulder” as he’s creating his books, designing his journal layouts and placing collectively his photographic sequence.
Contact sheets and technical prints will reveal the photographer’s decision-making and his ability within the darkroom as he manipulated mild and shadow. Meanwhile, his letters and diaries will reveal his personal sense of uncertainty about his work.
“He was known as a very independent photographer who was really going his own way, apart from photographic traditions, and he cultivated that image himself,” Haest says. “He was also known as a very outspoken and extroverted artist. But when I got a chance to delve into the correspondence archive, I found that he was often doubting his own motivations and convictions. It gives us a completely different view.”
• Ed van der Elsken: Up Close, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 19 June-13 September