Part of Exhibition Notes, a series on shows worth your time.
There are exhibitions you walk through, and there are exhibitions that stay with you for days afterwards. Ed van der Elsken. Up Close is definitely the second kind for me, and it opens at the Rijksmuseum today, 19 June, where it stays until 13 September 2026.
Ed van der Elsken is widely regarded as the most influential Dutch photographer of the twentieth century, a pioneer of street photography who did something quietly radical for his time. He pointed the camera at his own life and treated it as worthy subject matter. His pictures aren’t polite or posed. They feel close, a little restless, full of the people he actually loved and argued with and followed around. Looking at them, you get the sense he tried to understand all the strangers he photographed.
The exhibition creates a portrait of how he worked, where he found his inspiration and the struggles he had as a photographer that insisted on capturing every aspect of life. Alongside the famous images there are photographs almost no one has seen, plus contact sheets, letters, notes, his book designs and fragments of film. I love that you can see the choices, the rejected frames, the scribbles in the margins.
The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition is a film of Ed van der Elsken photographing the famous (in the Netherlands) cow market in Purmerend. It’s not a glamorous subject at all, but it is fascinating to see him walking around, asking people to pose for a photo, and the results. It immediately sets the tone for the story the exhibition will tell about this photographer: he made great photos in any location, any crowd or situation. He captured everything, glamorous or not (mostly not). He liked to capture the real life: messy, weird, fun.
I left thinking hard about why anyone bothers to make images at all. For Van der Elsken, it was always about paying proper attention to the people in front of him. That is the thing I keep turning over. I found the whole exhibition very inspiring. I knew his work before, but I didn’t knew much about his life. Also, to go though all of his work in one go gives you a totally different perspective.
If you photograph, even just on your phone on the tram, I think you’ll leave this exhibition with a head full of ideas and with an urge to go out there and look at people. It reminded me of all the photo projects I wanted to do along the years and never got to them, of how I stopped photographing some things because they wouldn’t get many likes on social media or I can’t use in articles. It reminded me I have to stop caring less about what the expectations are and care more about what I actually want to capture, about the stories I want to tell.
As someone who has made a photo book and dreams of making many more, I found his process fascinating to follow: the experimentation, the selection, the years he sometimes spent on a single book before it was ready.
If you are not a photographer, you’ll still love this because you will meet a man who lived loudly and looked closely, whose life can inspire you in many ways.
This exhibition is possible because in 2019, the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum together acquired his complete work archive, forty years of it. That depth is what lets the show trace his whole arc, from the moment he chose the precarious life of an independent photographer to the final work he made while terminally ill, the 1990 film Bye, in which he turned the camera on his own dying. It is a lot of life in a few rooms.
If you want to go
Ed van der Elsken. Up Close runs from 19 June to 13 September 2026 at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The museum is open daily from 9.00 to 17.00. Tickets are €25 for adults, free for anyone 18 and under, and free with Museumkaart. It’s worth booking your time slot in advance, especially in the first weeks and over summer weekends. There’s also a book, Ed van der Elsken. Up Close, put together by Rijksmuseum curator Hinde Haest and designed by Irma Boom, if you want to take some of it home with you.
↪ Want to plan your visit? Book your ticket or a Ticket and a canal cruise.
Stay tuned for more and follow Amsterdamian on Instagram and Facebook for more stories about life in the Netherlands. Please share this post if you liked it!
Check out my photo book: Amsterdam Through the Seasons!
Love what you’re reading? Support my work with a small donation.
