Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) was born in Amsterdam, where he was trained as a stonecutter and sculptor until 1944. Inspired by the photojournalistic Picture Post and Weegee’s Naked City he shifted his interest from sculpting to photography in the late 1940s. When he tried his luck Paris in 1950, he took up a job printing photos in the darkrooms of Magnum agency. There he met his future wife, the Hungarian photographer Ata Kandó, who was twelve years his senior and was part of the bohemian rive gauche. Through the friendships and acquaintances of Ata, Van der Elsken became one of the best-known documentalists of that seminal post-war scene. Van der Elsken divorced Ata in 1955 and moved back to Amsterdam, where his photo novel Love on the Left Bank – starring Australian bohémienne Vali Myers – was published by De Bezige Bij one year later. The influential edition was to be the first of some twenty photo books published over the following decades.
Van der Elsken’s photo book Eye Love You was first published in 1977. The book about “happiness, sorrow, suffering, death, strife, courage, vitality”, contains 164 pages of candid fullcolour photos shot by Van der Elsken during his travels all over the world for various magazines. The condition of this first printing copy is fine.