Sweet Life (Ed Van Der Elsken) (1966)

“Sweet Life” is what the well-known Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken somewhat ironically called the photo album he brought back from a journey through Asia and America.

His pictures are, however, anything but the sort of travel snapshots tourists typically bring home to show off. Van der Elsken never photographed so-called sights or picturesque landscapes and their inhabitants. They do appear in his photographs, but the camera’s real focus is always on people—their suffering and happiness, the diversity of life, all its complexity and contradictions, and the empathy and engagement with which he observed them, recorded sincerely and honestly, sometimes with startling brutality.

The sequence of images thus becomes an exciting report on human destiny in our time (and not only in our own), and everything exotic and unfamiliar reveals itself as sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but ultimately only incidental local color—a backdrop for the same human drama found everywhere, whose conditions in Hong Kong or in a remote Chinese provincial city are no different from those anywhere else.

Text in German