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Eduard van der Elsken (1925–1990) was a Dutch photographer and filmmaker. His imagery provides quotidian, intimate and autobiographic perspectives on the European zeitgeist spanning the period of the Second World War into the nineteen-seventies in the realms of love, sex, art, music (particularly jazz), and alternative culture.
He described his camera as “infatuated,” and said: “I’m not a journalist, an objective reporter, I’m a man with likes and dislikes.” His style is subjective and emphasizes the seer over the seen; a photographic equivalent of first-person speech.
Over the course of his 40-year career, Van der Elsken took around 100,000 photographs, “collecting my kind of people.” Take a look at these incredible pictures of the people of Amsterdam taken by Van der Elsken in the 1960s and 1970s:
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