bye

Two years before his death, photographer Ed van der Elsken, always fearless in documenting life as he encountered it, chose to document his own encounter with death. The resulting documentary, titled “Bye” was broadcast yesterday, as “viewer’s choice”. Ed’s voice is always a feature in all his documentary work: an ironic, knowledgeable, intimate voice that takes you along on his journey of discovery. And so it is with “Bye”. I lay listening to that voice, chronicling the decline, the having to let go, a last advice to the viewer: “Be strong everybody. Take care. Show who you are.”

Van der Elsken is also the photographer I associate most with city life, whether in Paris, Tokyo or Amsterdam. 

 

Ed Van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, originally published in 1956, is not the kind of love Gene Kelly liked to warble about. It is more love on the dole – without the dole. It is about tangential lovers – slipshod, absent-minded or just out-of-their-mind gropers: young people with neither social nor political awareness. They are neither traditional clochards, nor drop-out students, nor the traditional unemployed – just lives inexplicably stalled.

Paris had many pockets of these tribes, and they were perfect subjects for this Dutch photographer, who arrived in the city in 1950 at the age of 25. His beginnings were auspicious: his first lodgings were an upturned boat on the quays by the Htel de Ville, which he shared with two tramps. He was already predisposed to record those with “feelings of uncertainty, anger, depression, pessimism and defeatism”, rather than sanitised romance on the banks of the Seine or the peacock glories of the Folies Bergère.

Van der Elsken, whose work was later exhibited to great acclaim in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said that he found his perfect subjects in St-Germain-des-Prés. Only it isn’t St-Germain-des-Prés. It is Odéon, a place I know well. A decade after Van der Elsken, I briefly settled in the village where he shot his photo-romance. The book shows the same wan cafes: the Monaco, the Old Navy. The unnamed cafe with its chess players could only be the morose Tournon, up by the Luxembourg gardens.

Here are the same cheap, mangy hotels, on Rue Guisarde and Rue des Canettes. Here is the Petite Source, where we both gorged on frankfurters-frites. He spares us Chez Jean, in the alley behind, where the stench of cooking was so poisonous you would only go in there drunk, and refers tactfully to “the Greek” on Rue Gregoire de Tours. It was more accurately “the Greasy Greek”.

“Bye” takes us on a journey through hospitals, the process of being demolished by cancer. Ed tells us about his castration, performed in the hope that it would stem the progress of his illness. He speaks of his love for Johnny, his nine year old son and of Anneke, his wife, and his longing for sex. Ed never was an “objective” photographer. His style was always eminently personal. Once “Bye” becomes available online, I’ll link to it. Meanwhile: 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10HYv5THc3M[/youtube]