Looking For Love On The Left Bank

Ed van der Elsken

Looking For Love On The Left Bank
LOOKING FOR LOVE oN THE LEFT BAnK

Ed van der Elsken

Text by Tamara Bergsman

 

Format 20×27 cm

112 pages

B/W and color photogrphs and documents

French/English

39€

 

Watch the video – Behind the Book #1

Looking For Love On The Left Bank

The photo-novel revisited by Ed van der Elsken

 

 

Ed van der Elsken arrived in Paris in 1950, where he met his “soul mates” in a group of bohemians from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In the manner of a diary, he photographed each of their movements, particularly those of the beautiful redheaded Vali Myers.

 

His photographic story mixes fiction and reality, instituting a new genre of photo book, the photo novel. The reconstruc- tion of the process of making this book from previously unpublished documents – contact sheets, dummies, sketches, colour prints, annotated maps of Paris – reveals not only the nihilistic state of mind of youth bathed in a post-war existentialist climate, but also the cinematographic character of the layout.

 

From all these documents was drawn a fiction superimposed on Van der Elsken’s initial narrative developed in Love on the Left Bank. This visual narrative is accompanied by a text by Tamara Berghmans, curator at the FoMu in Antwerp and author of a dissertation on the book.