Alongside Johan van der Keuken, Ed van der Elsken, often called a “photographer of the margins,” occupies a singular place in twentieth-century documentary Dutch photography and cinema. In addition to his well-known images, the Galerie nationale Jeu de Paume features a collection of documents — contact sheets, sketches, layouts, letters, and notes — that shed fresh light on Elsken’s work and personality.
On Photography as the Art of Anxiety – Introduction to The Lucid Eye
By Alain Bergala
In the year 2000, a man collected the photos he had taken in the course of the last 46 years. This man is internationally known today as one of the greatest docume
Nothing in Van der Keuken’s photographic work ever tries to absorb his permanent anxiety, to freeze his ceaseless meditation on the themes which preoccupy him, to offer any hope of one day attaining the serenity of even a temporary stability. The collection of these photos, taken by the same man between the ages of 15 and 60, finally separated from the stills from his films, provides for the first time striking evidence in book form of this permanent ontological anxiety, the spiral track of which is reflected in his successive photographic projects.
