The street as a stage, the camera as a conversation – Anyone familiar with Ed van der Elsken’s photography will recognise its energy immediately. A young woman defiantly sticking out her tongue, tough youths hanging around Amsterdam’s Nieuwendijk, lovers, artists and chance encounters: Van der Elsken did not photograph people from a distance. He photographed from within life itself. His images are direct, sometimes provocative, often tender, and always intensely curious.
The exhibition Ed van der Elsken. Up Close, on view at the Rijksmuseum from 19 June to 13 September 2026, goes beyond the photographer’s best-known images. Its real focus is the process behind them. What happens before a photograph becomes an iconic image? What does a photographer notice, which pictures are rejected, and how many times can an idea be reconsidered?
This makes the exhibition particularly revealing. Since 2019, the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum have jointly cared for Van der Elsken’s personal archive. Years of research have made it possible to present this material alongside his photographs for the first time on such a comprehensive scale. Visitors encounter familiar images as well as handwritten notes, contact sheets marked with corrections, darkroom experiments and previously unseen book dummies.
Across nine galleries, the exhibition follows Van der Elsken’s career from his first reportage work in the early 1950s to the making of his final photobooks in the late 1980s. Amsterdam is an important starting point, but his curiosity was never confined to one city. His journeys to places including Cuba and Japan reveal the same fascination with unfiltered energy, spontaneity and human connection.
It is in the material surrounding the photographs that Van der Elsken’s distinctive approach becomes most apparent. He did not simply record reality; he shaped it. He selected, cropped, reprinted, rearranged and experimented. Some projects took years to complete. Others never became books at all, remaining in his archive for decades. Up Close therefore presents not only the photographer behind the camera, but the restless and inventive artist at work.
That is what makes the exhibition more than a retrospective. It encourages us to look at Van der Elsken’s photographs again — and to recognise that their apparent spontaneity could be the result of an extraordinary amount of searching.
Ed van der Elsken permanently changed Dutch photography. Not because he discovered one perfect way of taking pictures, but because he kept experimenting, changing direction and starting again. His work still feels remarkably contemporary: alive, free and unpolished, with a view of people grounded in curiosity rather than distance.
Ed van der Elsken. Up Close is on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 13 September 2026.
Photography: Dutch Design Daily
