Book of the Week: Selected by InHae Yap

Book Review feest Photographs by Ed Van Der Elsken Reviewed by InHae Yap "Ed van der Elsken’s feest arrives in my hands like a guidebook, moving with ease through scenes I remember distantly: the freewheeling excitement of carnivals and parades, the raucous joys of private apartment parties, the solemn decor of state visits and religious processions..."

feest by Ed Van Der Elsken.

feest
Photographs by Ed Van Der Elsken

Nai010, 2020. 224 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 4½x7x¾".

Watching pre-pandemic movies isn’t quite the same anymore. I cringe when people lean into one another, grind and sweat in clubs, or share food. Even animated films sometimes elicit an involuntary flinch. It’s not precisely a reaction of disgust, nor of envy, but perhaps something closer to bewilderment: is it possible that I, too, once moved among strangers without any such inhibitions? The feeling is foreign; my body has forgotten.

Ed van der Elsken’s feest arrives in my hands like a guidebook, moving with ease through scenes I remember distantly: the freewheeling excitement of carnivals and parades, the raucous joys of private apartment parties, the solemn decor of state visits and religious processions. “Feest” is often translated to its closest English cognate, “feast,” and certainly this monograph is a feast of sumptuous visual excess, if not one of literal food and drink. Though modest in size (measuring just 4.5 x 7.75”), feest is filled to the brim –– crammed, even –– with images, each printed to the very edge of the page. In this way, feest bursts with all the vivacity of its namesake.

feest is the result of a collaborative effort between the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. The two institutions had jointly acquired van der Elskin’s archive in 2019 when they discovered the preliminary designs for an unpublished photobook, which consisted of little more than a cover design and a selection of photographs pieced together with yellowed tape. Why the project was never completed remains unknown; there is no mention of feest in van der Elsken’s correspondence with publishers or friends. In an accompanying essay, curators at the Rijksmuseum recount the unique process of posthumously researching and publishing a book with few, if any, archival records to speak of.

We do know that van der Elsken began feest around 1960, at the tail-end of a particularly exciting period in his life. Many of its images were taken in the fifties, running parallel to the bohemian culture that inspired two of his major publications of that decade, Love on the Left Bank (1956) and Jazz (1959). feest also features images from the artist’s fourteen-month world tour at the end of the decade. This tour resulted in another celebrated monograph, Sweet Life (1966), a gritty travelogue that might be best compared to Robert Frank’s The Americans. As a loose chronicle of van der Elsken’s early career and the European postwar zeitgeist, feest is a fascinating archive in its own right.

That’s not to say, however, that the photographs in feest follow any clear chronological progression. Parisian May Day demonstrations in 1950 easily give way to birthday parties in 1959 Amsterdam, before jumping to Durban in the southern hemisphere. Rather, its narrative arc is purely visual. We focus on the grainy, high-contrast “snapshot” style that imbues these disparate images with a quivering, barely-contained sense of energy. (It’s no surprise that van der Elsken was also an avid filmmaker.) Combined with van der Elsken’s preference for blurred shots of people in motion, feest becomes a cinematic reel of fleeting impressions.

The book’s dynamic edit reminds me that photography is very much a physical activity. Like moving through a crowd, my progression through its pages is only loosely linear, for I am constantly distracted. Every step further into the fray brings a new sight, the last spectacle already half-forgotten. I meander through the party, lingering upon a face frozen in laughter, like a snarl, or a harlequin figure with legs flashing the can-can. There is the occasional feeling of déjà vu –– and indeed, some photos are repeated throughout the book, cropped or resized within new contexts. I am helpless against the relentless flow of images; my body revels in it.

As we follow Van der Elsken’s footsteps, I recall Charles Baudelaire’s great admiration for the flâneur, the modern artist whose “passion and profession is to merge with the crowd.” feest embodies the sensorial thrill of roaming through metropolitan life, even sixty years past its initial creation. And in the midst of our current social isolation, it is a joyous reminder of what we can look forward to in the intangible, post-pandemic future.

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InHae Yap is a researcher whose work explores shared themes, questions, and histories between photography and anthropology. Her writing has appeared in photo-eye, Strange Fire Collective, and Critical Interventions, among other publications. She is currently based in New York.