“IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL”

VAN DER ELSKEN, Ed. Liebe in Saint Germain des Prés [Love on the Left Bank]. (Amsterdam: Rowohlt Verlag, 1962). Octavo, original brown paper-covered boards, original photographic dust jacket. $950.

Second edition in German, the scarce first work by Dutch photographer van der Elsken, an “important and influential early example of” the diarist photobook (Parr & Badger), with 216 heliogravures.

“Ed van der Elsken was the best known internationally of the Dutch photographers of the 1950s and 60s due in no small measure to this book, which took the genre of the Dutch photonovel to a new level, and announced the presence in Europe of a stream-of-consciousness photographer on a par with William Klein… The book remains an important and influential early example of a genre that has become increasingly popular in the late 20th century—the diaristic mode” (Parr & Badger I:245). Van der Elsken’s images of “artists, addicts, deadbeats, would-be intellectuals and dealers who… lived for the moment” were shaped into his first work at the urging of Edward Steichen, who featured the young photographer in a landmark 1953 MoMA exhibit. His “blend of informal photojournalism and diaristic note-taking set a precedent for the sort of engaged personal book works that Larry Clark and Nan Goldin would make decades later” (Roth, 146). “The book’s layout accentuates the various photographic methods” used by van der Elskin in joining this intimate photonovel to the electrifying urban photo-essays of his generation (Open Book, 21). Scarce second edition in German preceded by the 1956 first edition published simultaneously in English, German and Dutch. See Open Book, 168.

Book fine; light edge-wear to bright, near-fine dust jacket.