Tag

Ed van der Elsken

Jul 16
0

for Vali Myers

By | photography

It’s July 1988, Paris is hot, very hot and tourists have taken over the town. The Parisians have left for the coast or their country house and the wooden panels are fastened in front of the shop windows. I’m glad I have found a cheap room in the Hôtel d’Alsace Lorraine, 14 rue des Canettes that my friend Peter, the African Art dealer from Amsterdam has mentioned to me. It is situated in a very old building in one of the streets of the rive gauche that leads up to the monumental Place Saint Sulpice, where I like to sit in the shadow of the trees. Going up the stairs of the old hotel I noticed the framed newspaper clipping, telling that the concierge of this hotel used to be Madame Céleste Albaret, the gouvernante of Marcel Proust. The whole place breathes history; I already bumped my head very hard on one of its mediaeval oak beams which runs right through the middle of my small room, which is entresol, halfway two floors, the toilet is nondescript with a door made of planks with holes. In the sunny morning I wake up to the unfamiliar noises of a Paris street. I make a good start of the day and take a few pictures of my bed: the pushed-back blankets are the rolling waves of a restless sea and the old faded wallpaper has a repeating pattern of a sky with hovering seagulls…

Back in Holland I visit my friend Ed van der Elsken, who likes to hear about my trip to Paris. He inquires about my photography and asks where I stayed. He reacts very surprised when I tell him about the Hôtel d’Alsace Lorraine. He urges me to describe the room. “But that’s Vali’s room!” he exclaims, and his light blue eyes stare at me, “Tom, that’s incredible, that’s the room where she lived 30 years ago! She always had the curtains drawn and lived in a dream world, addicted to opium, only came out at night during that period… What a coincidence… and you never knew?…” When I tell him about the photograph I took in that room with the imaginary dreamtime seascape he seems almost moved, says he wants to see it soon, “bring it next time”. In his book “Elsken:PARIS 1950-1954” (Libroport Co. Ldt., Tokyo, 1985) Ed, the Dutch photographer, quotes Vali telling how madame Céleste watched over her like a mother during that vulnerable time. She proudly said to a visitor “You are going up to see the strange one, my favorite jewel.”

I titled the picture “Sea of dreams (for Vali Myers)”  You can have a look at some of my Paris photographs from that period at http://www.tomstappers.com . The photograph “Sea of dreams (for Vali Myers)” can be seen at http://www.photogalaxy.com/photo/tomstappers/2/?m=0.0.0.tomstappers.az

Ed promised to introduce me to Vali, but I only saw her at his funeral in the old church of Edam and standing at his grave afterwards, in thoughts. She was smaller than I had imagined her, fiery hair, tattoos, quiet, unapproachable, almost shy. It was such a sad day, I did not talk to her. One look – all. There’s a photograph of her on my wall that I often look at in passing.

May 05
0

old world, new world

By | photography

I went to see the photographs Robert Frank took when he visited Paris in the 1950’s after he had moved to the United States. Even though I have seen much of his work, including some of his exhibited photographs, I was impressed again by the intensity of his vision which makes the technical imperfections of some of his small prints completely irrelevant. Photography from the heart, the way it should be. And Paris, impoverished after the war, has become a silent, shy old lady in his pictures, tired, scarred and wrinkled, of another time and full of memories. Frank, expatriate, reminded of his own past, sees himself in its inhabitants, survivors of the hard years, picking up their inglorious lives amidst the remnants of history. Soft trembling greys fill out these photographs, lots of empty space in the suburbs where an old horse endures the playful children, walls, cobblestones, old building in the morning mist. In the park the chairs await sunnier days, the stuff that chansons are made of, a few flowers in an improvised vase, left alone, Paris stuck in its past, the fifties.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, added a smaller series from its collection of Ed van der Elsken photographs, also Paris in the 1950’s. Worlds apart from Robert Frank. Ed, who was a friend of mine, wasn’t looking for the past, but found a new freedom in the group of rebellious young outcasts that hung around in the cafés and jazz joints of the rive gauche. He was fascinated by Vali Myers, who was an excentric free soul from Australia. Ed built her a monument in photographs (“Love on the Left Bank”), which also became a portrait of Paris. His photographs are noisier, wildly romantic and printed in dark contrasts, celebrating youth and the promise of the new freedom that was in the air. Both Ed and Vali have died, but they live on.

Apr 07
0

hit rate

By | photography

The subject came up again some time ago: how many of the photographs you have taken on a certain occasion do you really use in the end? I remember talking about it one afternoon years ago with my friend Ed van der Elsken, looking at the peacocks outside his farmhouse near Edam. He was known to be a prolific shooter and wondered what my results were. His were about one “usable” (as he called it) picture for every film, so 1 out of 36. By usable he meant “worth publishing” by the way, not “technically o.k.” of course, and he had a good eye for catchy images! Neither of us used motor drives then, needless to say. I had to think of it, but thought that overall, my results matched his 1 out of 36.

When I did use motordrives for the house parties series, the numbers went up quite naturally, and after one of these many nights I came home at 4.30 a.m. tired, but with 14 exposed films in my pockets, my best result until then. As I had agreed that my hit score was about the same as Ed’s it was reasonable to expect something like 10 to 14 great pictures, for I had not even made excessive use of the motordrive (I never do, preferring the single exposure mode to sequences). This was not bad at all, but of course it’s only the “rough material” for laying out a series, and more than one perfect image gets edited out  later. In fact, the more choice you have, the better the series will be in the end.

Mar 19
0

the print – a valuable object

By | photography

When I was young I used to work in a photo archive. It was an archive with thousands of images of Dutch landscapes, windmills, national costumes, folklore, old buildings etc., etc., to which I had proudly contributed. All of these photographs were just “material” for publications by the tourist industry, and the photographers were paid very little. We used to charge only administrative and actual replacement costs to those customers who never returned the lent material after use. Some even had the nerve to send back an envelope with the cut-up prints, snippets and all, or otherwise spoilt photographs with paper pasted on, texts written on the back that showed up like relief on the front, as more signs of utter disrespect for the photographer’s work (and remember, I’m talking about the darkroom, not the computer). Captions reattached to the prints after use by means of a stapler, small creases or scratches were no real problem! “You can’t see that in printing.” When the stock was almost gone for very popular images (yes, you guessed right, the inevitable windmills, tulips – in black&white – and wooden shoes) we just ordered another batch from the photographer, who didn’t mind… When a particularly nice picture came by, it was more than once confiscated and pinned up to the wall. There were some with well-known photographer’s names.

Ed van der Elsken said to me once that he regretted he had disregarded the uniqueness, and indeed value, of his old (vintage) press prints from his Paris, old Amsterdam and Sweet Life periods. He had used them to create a unique intro to his exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum: by gluing them to the walls, the floor and the ceiling of the entrance hall. Very hip and contemporary at the time maybe, but what a pity in retrospect !!!

It is a strange thought that in fact, even the photographers themselves had to be taught the value of a lot of their old, and often forgotten prints. The scarcity of good (often vintage) prints, not caused by limited editions, but simple lack of interest in those days, has not escaped the attention of the collectors. They already know that a work of art “signed all over” needn’t necessarily be signed to be collectible.