Perhaps one of the best introductions to Ed van der Elsken’s work was by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian when his classic Love on the Left Bank, first published in 1956, was published in a facsimile edition by Dewi Lewis in 2011. As O’Hagan makes clear, despite the raw documentary look and feel (‘grainy, monochrome cinéma vérité’), the book is a fictional work, a ‘photo-novel’. In another well-turned phrase, O’Hagan calls it ‘one of the first visual narratives that walks the line between fly-on-the-wall reportage and created narrative.’
The Dewi Lewis edition seems still to be available according to the publisher’s web site, though you can buy it more cheaply secondhand (or, should you be so inclined, pay several times the cover price – as always it pays to search around a little.) Van der Elsken, (1925-90), sometimes called the ‘enfant terrible’ of Dutch photography, was a prolific maker of books, as the list on his web site reveals. It’s in part a strange web site, with an off-putting selection of small images under the link to pictures, which finally leads the persistent to an index page for more of his work. The images this leads to are of more interest, although poor scans – it looks like a site from the early days a few years after his death when getting any image on the web was a novelty.
You can see his work from ‘Love on the Left Bank’ better on Lensculture, and there is a more varied selection about him on AmericanSuburbX. I’ve not seen all of his books, but Jazz (1988) has been republished several times and is available reasonably second-hand and there is an Errata Editions ‘Book on Book’ of his Sweet Life (1966) also at a reasonable price, though the original book costs around ten times as much. I wasn’t quite taken enough with his Hong Kong when Dewi Lewis published it in 1997 to buy it, and it now also seems expensive.