Having made his name with the groundbreaking black-and-white photo book Love on the Left Bank (1954), the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken travelled widely. For the epic Sweet Life (1966), he undertook a 14-month journey around the world, shooting in west Africa, America, Mexico, Japan and China. Some of his most vibrant work, though, was made on the streets of his home town, Amsterdam, where he shot hippies, street people, the fashionable and the itinerant, while mixing with the city’s artistic avant garde.
In this shot, actors and extras from a 1979 film called Cha Cha are having a break from shooting on location in Ruigoord, a village near the harbour in west Amsterdam. (Ruigoord had been squatted by artists in 1973, having been empty for several years. It remains a thriving alternative artists’ community to this day.) The man in the white shirt, scratching his head, is the Dutch rock singer Herman Brood, who wrote and starred in the film, playing a reformed bank robber trying to reinvent himself as a rock star. Brood had actually served time for dealing LSD before becoming a fixture of the local punk scene. His co-star, the strikingly beautiful German punk singer Nina Hagen, is reclining in the right foreground, resplendent in black latex body suit and flame-coloured hair. The film features a wedding between Brood and Hagen and, in real life, the two were an item for a short while.
Van der Elsken’s image captures a carefree moment in time, Amsterdam’s lingering hippy vibes still detectable even amid the creative anarchy of the post-punk era. It is a haunting image given what was to eventually follow. Brood went on to reinvent himself as a painter, but continued to struggle with drug addiction despite several attempts to clean up. In 2001, aged 54, he killed himself.
By then, Van der Elsken had also passed on, succumbing to cancer in 1990. He left behind a vast archive of images, books and films, including Bye, a defiant farewell shot from his final months. In 2016, the Nederlands Fotomuseum discovered traces of mould on his colour slides. It precipitated a successful crowd-funding campaign, enabling the restoration of around 42,000 photographs. This image appears in a retrospective of his colour work, entitled Lust for Life, now on show at the museum.
Lust for Life: Ed van der Elsken in Colour runs until 6 October at Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam. The book, Lust for Life, is out now (Dewi Lewis, £35)
