His imagery provides quotidian, intimate and autobiographic perspectives on the European zeitgeist[1] spanning the period of the Second World War into the 1970s in the realms of love, sex, art, music (particularly jazz), and alternative culture.

These encounters inspired his interest in photography and that year he took work in photo sales and attempted a correspondence course with the Fotovakschool in Den Haag, failing the final examination.

Ata was a principled documentarian[6] whose pictures taken in the forests of the Amazon among the Piraoa and Yekuana tribes are her best known,[n 3] but her more poetic leanings, exemplified in her Droom in het Woud (Dream in the Wood, photographed 1954 in Switzerland and Austria, published 1957) must also have been an influence on Van der Elsken and his decision to move from newspaper reportage to aim to become a magazine photojournalist.

The latter photograph featured in the 'adult play' section of the show, and is a chiaroscuro, tight frame cropping fragments of the faces of two women and a man who eyes others at an opening or event over his cigarette, and a male hand (possibly v. d. Elsken's) thrusting a wine glass into the foreground.

[10] Another encounter was with Vali Myers (1930–2003) who became the haunting kohl-eyed heroine of his roman à clef photo-novel[11] Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1956; its English-language version was titled Love on the left bank).

However, he succeeded with the renowned British magazine Picture Post, which devoted a four-part series in 1954 to the imagery entitled Why did Roberto leave Paris?.

Manuel tells how in Paris he fell in love with the beautiful Ann (Vali Myers), who hangs out in bars in Saint Germain des Prés and dances wildly in the jazz cellars.

Close-ups of the faces of Ann and Manuel were blown up to the breadth of a spread, while small photos are aligned in film strips like contact prints on a page.

Manuel's nightmare reaches a dramatic climax in the photo where Ann, her pale eyes closed, self-poisoned, floats in a steamy mirror, followed by a black blank page.

It quickly sold out in Europe and the UK, and its filmic qualities led to Van der Elsken's subsequent experiments with, and parallel career in, cinema.

He then traveled extensively, to Bagara[26] 1957 (now in Central African Republic), and to Tokyo and Hong Kong in 1959 to 1960, with Gerda van der Veen (1935–2006) also a photographer, whom he married (25 September 1957).

Rather than attempting an overview or comprehensive history, Horak opts for a close, circumscribed reading of the work of a few individuals who have traversed the two media throughout their careers.

The artists selected, Chris Marker, Helmar Lerski, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Ed van der Elsken, range from the renowned to the obscure, making the book at once invitingly familiar and provocatively broadening.