Cafe Noir

ArtForum, March, 2000 by Vince Aletti

Who am I to spout about life, love, happiness? About whether all's right with the world, or whether it's just a vale of tears, so store up your treasures for heaven. I think it's unbelievable, fabulous, this life of ours--everything, the birds and the bees, the deer and the antelope, the spacious skies, the foggy dew, the rockabye babies....My wife's embrace, a landing on the moon, space, time, eternity. I don't understand one damn thing about any of it, except that it's enough to keep me in a constant delirium of delight, surprise, enthusiasm, despair, enough to keep me roaming, stumbling, faltering, cursing, adoring, hating the destruction, the violence in myself and others.

WHO AM I? In 1965, when Ed van der Elsken wrote those words, he was a forty-year-old unreconstructed bohemian photographer-filmmaker living in Amsterdam, the city of his birth, with a wife, two children, and very little money. He had published three utterly original photo books--on jazz, Africa, and Paris's disaffected youth--that had made him quite famous in the Netherlands but left him largely unknown outside Europe and Japan. Though Edward Steichen put one of van der Elsken's Paris photos in the Museum of Modem Art's 1955 humanist blockbuster, "The Family of Man," and included eighteen more prints from the same series in an earlier exhibition of postwar European work, the photographer had been too broke to attend either show, and Love on the Left Bank went unpublished in the United States. He had just spent more than three years tinkering with the layout of another book, his first to find an American publisher. A record of his fourteen-month trip around the globe in 1959 and '60, it had been originally cal led Crazy World, but van der Elsken retitled it Sweet Life, after a steamer he photographed in the Philippine port of Cebu. The ship's name provided a casually ironic comment on the shot of a dockworker hefting crates of soda bottles on his naked back and prompted the overheated philosophical ramble above, one of many van der Elsken wrote not so much to annotate his pictures as to illuminate the earnest, outlandish, romantic, often infuriating man who took them.

"I'm not a journalist, an objective reporter," van der Elsken wrote in the course of another Sweet Life tangent. "I am a man with likes and dislikes." Though this determined subjectivity was most pronounced in the idiosyncratic cinema-verite films he began making in the '60s (culminating in Bye, the anguished but unflinching record of his death from advanced prostate cancer, in 1990), he was a passionately engaged observer from the beginning. His Paris photos, taken in the early '50s, explore Left Bank cafes and underworld dives in the stylistic footsteps of Brassai-in love with the night, and with life in the shadows. But they also anticipate the you-are-there flavor of later subcultural forays like Danny Lyons's The Bikeriders and Bruce Davidson's Brooklyn Gang as well as the seductive, bruising intimacy of Larry Clark's and Nan Goldin's pictures from the edge. Though not as rootless and aimless as his young subjects, many of them still scarred by the war, van der Elsken understood their alienation and sha red their free-floating rage. Hanging out with them, he says in a 1988 interview, "suited my feeling of uncertainty and anger, depression, pessimism, defeatism, all that."

He started photographing these beautiful losers "as a reflex, or as a kind of diary notation," and kept at it in spite of their burning hostility, if only so he could linger in the haute bohemian aura of the astonishing Vali Myers. Vali, an Australian exile, voluptuous narcissist, and sometime opium addict whose kohl-rimmed eyes look decades older (though no wiser) than the face they're in, is the most vivid presence in van der Elsken's Paris. An urchin with flair, her combination of petulant distraction and drop-dead insouciance made her the natural star of the narrative Steichen urged van der Elsken to tease out of his mass of photos. The resulting book, Love on the Left Bank, wasn't published until 1956, shortly after the photographer's return to Amsterdam, but its air of claustrophobic obsession and glamorous ennui was far from dissipated. Now a fictionalized, cinematic document featuring Vail as a femme fatale named Ann, Love on the Left Bank captures the restless spirit that animated the French New Wav e and remains the purest expression of van der Elsken's romance with the outsider.

The look of his Paris work--dark, rough, improvisatory, immediate--established van der Elsken at the vanguard of a style that takes off from Weegee (the only influence be acknowledges) and Robert Frank and ends up someplace much funkier and more personal. Because he was largely self-taught (he'd taken a correspondence course in photography in 1947 but failed his final exam), van der Elsken was less interested in technical perfection than in atmospheric zip. (As a film colleague noted approvingly, "If there was a choice between a certain formal or technical quality and an emotion, he always chose the emotion.") His freewheeling inventiveness was wide open to accident and surprise, to the roiling mess of life. Working only with natural light, he captured the sensuality and volatility of careless young Parisians by letting his images go soft or blur or nearly fall apart. His jazz photos, made without flash in Amsterdam nightclubs, are gorgeous fields of grain, as moody and soulful as a sax riff. And when he wen t on safari in Africa, his jittery pictures reflect both the exhilaration and the horror of the hunt; as a sequence, they feel joltingly filmic but almost hallucinatory--a trip. For van der Elsken, subjectivity was paramount; his best photos embody not just his point of view but his emotional investment and physical involvement, his fierceness, excitement, and joy. William Klein arrived at a remarkably similar style with his first book, Life Is Good and Good for You in New York, which also appeared in 1956, was never published in the US, and caused a sensation that rivaled Love on the Left Bank in Europe and eclipsed it in America. Klein and van der Elsken, both outsize personalities, followed parallel career paths-traveling widely, mining the exotica of Japan in the '50s, designing their own books (with similar emphasis on inky blacks, bold graphics, full-bleed pages, and jazzy layouts), doing editorial work for magazines, turning to film. Klein was the more radical stylist, experimenting with various format s and pushing his pictures further toward expressionism, but he wasn't as present in his work as van der Elsken was. He learned to accommodate himself to high-gloss fashion work by playfully subverting it, and became an international star while van der Elsken's reputation barely crossed the ocean. In spite of the success of Love on the Left Bank and regular forays into the wide world, van der Elsken tended to retreat to the comfort of Amsterdam, where he was a local hero and resident eccentric.