10 things about Ed van der Elsken

Ed began his career without any qualifications. In 1947 he failed the entrance exam at the Dutch School of Photography in The Hague. Many jobs followed: Ed learned by doing.

At photographer Marius Meijboom's studio he lasted exactly two days. He was fired after accidentally printing three hundred negatives incorrectly.

In the summer of 1950 he hitchhiked to Paris. The first night, by his own account, he slept under the Pont Neuf. He then moved into a small room on the seventh floor at 12 Rue Guisarde, for roughly €1.80 a week. The tap and toilet were three floors below. He hauled buckets of water up and down to develop his photographs.

His first job in Paris was at Pictorial Service, the photo lab of Magnum Photos. There he developed work by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and Ernst Haas, among others.

After six months it was over. Unsuited as he was to working for a boss, he left. He moved in with his partner Ata Kandó, a Hungarian photographer he had met in the Magnum darkroom.

In the darkroom he experimented endlessly with printing his photographs. By playing with cropping and contrast, he could produce completely different images from a single negative. He also worked with under- or double-exposed negatives, manipulating them extensively.

Australian artist Vali Myers played the lead role of 'Ann' in Ed's first book: Love on the Left Bank (1956). The book was both praised and condemned for its deep-black prints and bleak tone.

The black underscored the sense of purposelessness that Ed - and many of his contemporaries - wrestled with in the aftermath of the war.

At twenty, on her way to a new life in New York, American artist and performer Patti Smith bought a battered copy of Love on the Left Bank at a bus station. Vali Myers - "that mystical beatnik, nomadic visionary, queen of rain-soaked streets" - became for her an image of the freedom she sought and found in the city.

Between 1959 and 1960, Ed and his second wife Gerda van der Veen travelled the world together: through West and South Africa, across various Asian countries, and on to the United States and Mexico. The material formed the basis for Sweet Life (1966), his most influential book.

After his world trip, Ed spent more than five years searching for a publisher for what was then called Crazy World. Hesitant publishers and lack of money forced him to give up more than once. For six years he refined the design. Exhausted by the difficult publishing process, he dramatically declared photography behind him and committed himself entirely to film.

Commissions from Avenue magazine gave his photography new momentum, and he reinvented himself as a colour photographer.

When Ed first set foot on Japanese soil in 1959, he was already a celebrated photographer there. His work had appeared in Japanese photography magazines since 1954, and he had been interviewed multiple times on Japanese television. In Niigata, a café-bar called 'Ed van der Elsken' had even been opened in his honour. He would return to Japan many times throughout his life and published The Discovery of Japan in 1988.

An organised chaos of book dummies, contact sheets, sketches and notes dating back to the late 1940s. The archive offers a unique insight into the mind of the most innovative Dutch photographer of the twentieth century.