The line that runs from Walker Evans through to Robert Frank and Robert Adams (all subjects of past or future posts here) is probably the most important set of influences for the images created for Push Process, but there’s another line, one that runs from Brassaï, through Weegee’s Naked City (1945), on to the subject of today’s post, Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956), and thence to Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin (the last two also subjects of future posts).
Van der Elsken’s book seemingly owes nothing whatever to American Photographs, and, since I didn’t encounter it until long after I’d finished photographing in Venice, and even after I’d written Push Process, it wasn’t really a direct influence on my book (although I’d previously seen and admired some of the individual images). But it does offer a direct precedent for a work that juxtaposes documentary photographs with a fictional narrative, more so than Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is creative non-fiction (Agee must surely be one of the contenders for having invented this field). And while Let Us Now Praise Famous Men presents text and image as separate but interdependent statements, Love on the Left Bank, like Push Process, intercuts text and images throughout.
I don’t know much about magazine photojournalism of the 1950s, but surely Picture Post was not in the habit of dedicating four-part stories to virtually unknown photographers? So it must have impressed them, even if they saw fit to censor some details later restored for the book (e.g. a reference to venereal disease). I haven’t seen the magazine version, but the book design by Jurriaan Schrofer is certainly rooted in the tradition of magazine photo-story layouts (and in the example of Weegee’s Naked City), even if the layouts of Love on the Left Bank are bolder and more experimental than the usual Picture Post story.
The situation that led to the book’s creation is described by Hripsime Visser as follows in the Phaidon 55 monograph on van der Elsken. After he moved to Paris from Holland in 1950:
in a café he met a Russian, who dragged him along and introduced him to the bohemia of Saint-Germain-des-Prés – young people of every nationality, all of them marked by the war in one way or another. These were drifters who spent their days in bars, cafes and little restaurants, dazed by alcohol and drugs, desperate, bitter and negative. Van der Elsken photographed them, fascinated by something he discerned: an outlook on life. Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them, he captured them drinking, eating, making love and smoking. He had found his style: artificial lighting, smoke and reflections determine the atmosphere. [6]
The book situates its story in 1956 to match the date of publication, though obviously that can’t have been the case in the Picture Post version. Outside of the book, the individual images are elsewhere captioned with a possible date range of 1950–4, though in specific cases also 1951 and 1953. In other words, while the book purports to be set in the mid-50s, it actually depicts the early 50s. This is significant insofar as Love on the Left Bank depicts the aftermath of the Second World War – although it’s also important that most of the characters were too young to have fought in that conflict. Van der Elsken, born in 1925, was a few years older: he'd gone underground in Holland in 1945 to evade forced labour.
Love on the Left Bank is often described as the first photonovel or beeldroman, the Dutch term suggesting the importance of that country in the history of this genre. So obviously there were other examples, for example Johan van der Keuken’s We Are Seventeen (1955) is often cited. The prior date perhaps does not qualify it as the ‘first’ either because van der Elsken initially published in 1954, or because We Are Seventeen was avowedly non-fictional, a collective portrait of the author and his friends at the titular age. It’s hard to say how influential or widespread this tradition was – although there are certainly famous non-Dutch examples like Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955: again, it's not immediately clear why this doesn't take precedence as the first example). My associations with the term ‘photonovel’ are of 80s romance comics where paid actors were directed to act out teen dramas sometimes based on readers’ letters. But if one considers the alternative descriptions of the beeldroman as ‘diaristic’ or ‘stream-of-consciousness’, it’s a tradition that might include Robert Frank, and certainly looks forward to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
There’s actually very little text in Love on the Left Bank by comparison with even the shortest works of prose fiction, maybe about three thousand words total, and split into very short, non-continuous sections, sometimes only a sentence or two. Most of the text is descriptive and summary, setting up a situation, or sketching out the basic, shared conditions of life in the café society of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The frame narrative concerns a Mexican itinerant called Manuel who falls in love with a bohemian Australian dancer, Ann, played by Vali Myers, who is the real protagonist and principal subject of many of the photographs. For example:
We went to a little place called the Mau Mau and she slept in her chair. I fell in love with her. That afternoon we went for a walk. We wandered from café to café and I met Ann’s friends.
The last phrase then serves as the narrative justification for several spreads featuring, firstly Ann in various guises, then exteriors of the cafes, followed by portraits of the friends, both singly and in groups.
The excerpt above is pretty bald and functional prose, all tell and no show (because the photos perform the latter function), but other sections capture the quality of life quite well, either in short anecdotes or summaries. These often switch to third-person narration, and Manuel therefore seems to disappear periodically from both the text and the images. For example:
Dinner was a piece of bread eaten on the street. At night you could swipe milk bottles left on the pavement outside dairies. For thirty francs you could get chips at the Place de l’Odéon. When the going was good you might blow a hundred francs on a meat-ball or spaghetti Levantin. You could buy a litre of wine for less than sixty francs. You could sleep in cafes, on a bench in the Luxembourg, or in parked cars on the Place Saint Sulpice. During the day you could sleep in the cinema or the métro. When you had a new girl-friend you stood yourself to a room in a hotel.
Again, the next several pages then bear the weight of illustrating these several propositions, with some more textual details added in the margins of the image spreads. The individual images have no titles or captions, however – only these occasional narrative addenda.
Some of the photographs would have seemed pretty crude by contemporary journalistic standards: both technically and, perhaps, at the level of content, with occasional nudity. In fact, other than this nudity, there’s no explicit sexual content in the images, but there are numerous frank allusions in the text, e.g. to interracial and same-sex liaisons. Oddly the most graphic images for me are of people eating – voraciously, shamelessly, with no regard to manners or other people’s sensibilities.
Love on the Left Bank contains miniature examples of both the standardised series and the sequential narrative: a page with multiple shots of different café exteriors, each shot in the same manner; and a couple of dynamic situations developing over time (e.g. a girlfriend is disappointed when her beau is distracted by the arrival of a rival; the same man and a male friend get drunk and cause trouble on the Paris streets).
But the most important organising principle is that of restless variety: the book rarely sticks to the same kind of layout consecutively. Some pages or spreads have a single portrait image, for example a severely cropped face printed full bleed, extremely grainy. Others jumble images together as promiscuously as the café inhabitants mix with one another. In this, Love on the Left Bank resembles another book of the same period also influenced by Weegee, William Klein’s Life is good and good for you in New York: Trance Witness Revels – but since that was published in the same year as Love on the Left Bank, Klein’s work was presumably not a direct influence (and his book contains no real narrative element, fictional or otherwise). But one thing the two books share is an interest in pushing photographic technique until the limitations of the medium become part of the meaning of the image.
Sometimes van der Elsken's approach to layout sells individual images short: powerful, striking compositions get lost among the noise, especially when they are printed small and overshadowed by other, weaker images on the same page or spread. It also promotes several rather banal images to larger roles because of their illustrative function. But overall the visual cacophony gives what one imagines to be a good impression of the highly strung, overstimulated state of mind of the protagonists.
There’s also considerable variation in technique among the images: some were shot on a 35mm camera; others on a medium-format Rolleicord that produced 6x6cm negatives, that is, of higher quality. Some images were clearly shot handheld in available light only; others use flash, and a few of the more staged ones almost certainly used a tripod. Most were taken at night, both in the cafes and outside; a few in daylight. A few are also reproductions of drawings or paintings created by Ann or other characters, presumably photographed in a studio.
Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them: this is a very odd phrase. Clearly van der Elsken’s relation to his subjects is different to that depicted in, say, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959): closer, more personal, and above all ongoing. But curiously van der Elsken substitutes an alter-ego for himself, and suppresses any explicit acknowledgement of his role as resident artist to this decadent court centred around Queen Ann. There’s at least one image where, in the full-frame version, van der Elsken appears reflected in a mirror holding his Rolleicord, but he cropped this part out for reproduction in Love on the Left Bank. In other words, there is no photographer character: no one is taking these photos within the fictional world of the story.
The images where subjects respond directly to van der Elsken might seem to contradict this, but I think in these cases the camera temporarily assumes the viewpoint of an offscreen character – sometimes this is explicitly Manuel, but it’s never van der Elsken, since he does not exist in the fiction. In this self-erasure, van der Elsken is following photojournalistic tradition – but by presenting the narrative as fictional the conceit becomes more self-conscious than in most documentary photography. Perhaps one might say that the camera is a character, even if van der Elsken isn't.
Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them: from the images, we might speculate as to what was involved in practice. Nearly everyone depicted knew van der Elsken, was used to him being around and taking pictures. Vali Myers was his direct collaborator, who he both photographed as she went about her life, including in quite intimate circumstances in her home – and perhaps also directed or suggested preferred scenarios for her to improvise with.
Others were perhaps directed in their interactions with Myers to some degree – given a character and a scenario, or posed for particular shots, particularly the individuals cast as Manuel and Geri, the latter Ann’s flatmate and eventual lover (though neither of them have to ‘act’ in any real sense). But many others were probably not directed at all, just photographed opportunistically and spontaneously, and then fitted into a scenario or narrative post-facto. Or else van der Elsken seized on a situation unfolding and then used that as the basis for a subplot, such as the various escapades of Jean Michel and Benny, who both look a little too dangerous and unpredictable to submit to direction.
In this clip from a short film van der Elsken made with Vali Myers in 1972, she discusses Jean Michel and Benny using their real names:
Myers's commentary here suggests dispiriting fates for the people featured in the book: imprisonment, madness, suicide. What neither she or van der Elsken mention, either here or in Love on the Left Bank itself, is that this crowd included several members of the Letterist International, a group who later contributed several important concepts and personnel to the Situationist International, and thence to the 1968 protests in France – and beyond that, to the culture of punk. One of the LI members, Jean-Michel Mension – rechristened ‘Pierre’ by van der Elsken, i.e. not the pseudonymous ‘Jean Michel’ referred to above as is sometimes erroneously suggested – published a memoir of his time in what he called The Tribe in 2002. In it, he describes the prevailing attitude:
If someone had said … “I want to be a famous painter,” if someone had said “I want to be a famous novelist,” if someone had said, “I want in whatever way to be a success,” then that someone would have been tossed instantly out of the back room right through the front room onto the street. There was an absolute refusal … We rejected a world that was distasteful to us, and we would do nothing at all within it.
The history of the LI is explored in detail in Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces, which explains that the group's headquarters was the same cafe that lies at the centre of Love on the Left Bank, where it's rechristened as the Mau Mau:
The café was Chez Moineau, 22 rue de Four, a block from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. People from all over the world passed through. It was a haven for refugees, would-be artists, budding suicides, runaways and class cutters, petty criminals, dope pushers, bums, eccentrics (one old man regularly appeared in a Japanese warrior’s helmet from which, by means of a wire, he flew a pack of cigarettes), and the new Lettrist International, which is to say a table, where sat those [Guy] Debord [the leader of the LI, and later of the Situationist International] judged ready to change the world. ...
Though Debord forbade him on pain of violence to shoot the LI, van der Elsken roamed the room, aiming into the mirrors that covered the walls. In some ways, the pictures he got say as much about the LI as the manifestos the group was writing at its table—a fact Debord acknowledged when he clipped images out of van der Elsken’s first book … and dropped them into [his own account of this period] Mémoires. [349–50]
Marcus quotes from a 1954 manifesto of the LI, which also works as a description of van der Elsken's technique of fictionalisation:
The construction of situations will be the continuous realization of a great game, a game the players have chosen to play: a shifting of settings and conflicts to kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours. [320]
One should not overstate this connection: most of van der Elsken's characters were not members of the LI, and its most important members, notably Debord, do not appear in Love on the Left Bank.
The bar photographs in Push Process are not as complex or bold as van der Elsken's, although some have a similar look to his, since I was also interested in working at the limits of the medium (and I was also using black-and-white film). And like Love on the Left Bank, Push Process situates documentary photography within a fictional narrative, although with a much longer, continuous text. The characters it depicts perhaps have something in common with the denizens of Chez Moineau, though they are more conventional in their artistic aspirations. My first book Pistols! Treason! Murder!, a very experimental biography of a Venetian spy, which I researched and wrote during the same period in which I took the photographs featured in Push Process, is actually much closer to the provocations of the LI and the Situationists (it was described as 'punk history'). But in Push Process, unlike Love on the Left Bank, the creation of the photographs is the main subject of the narrative, and the photographer is the central protagonist. Conversely, the photographs do not purport to depict the characters in the story. Rather they are of strangers, in the mode of Walker Evans or Robert Frank. And after the text ends, there is an extended photo sequence modelled on Evan’s American Photographs (1938), depicting contemporary Venice.
Are there other precedents for this mingling of fiction and documentary photography? I was certainly influenced by Ross Gibson's novel The Summer Exercises (2009), together with the associated multimedia work Life After Wartime (2004), by Gibson and Kate Richards – both works juxtapose crime-scene photographs from the New South Wales police archives with a fictional narrative. I'll be writing or otherwise discussing this work elsewhere at some point. I was also aware of André Breton's Nadja (1928). There's also the novel Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavić, at least in the original edition, which was accompanied by a companion volume of photographs by David Goldblatt (2010). Are there other examples?
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