Looking for love on the left bank

Dutch photographer and filmmaker Ed van der Elsken relocated to Paris in 1950. There he found a bohemian group, closely following and photographing their everyday movements, intertwining fiction and reality in a new genre of photography book. The reconstruction of this process from unpublished documents – contact prints, sketches, maps – illuminates not only the nihilist worldview of the young people he befriends but also the cinematographic layout of the book, ‘Love on the Left Bank’. A fiction extracted from these documents confronts the original narrative that Van der Elsken established in the book, a visual story accompanied by a text by Tamara Berghmans.