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The photographic work of Valdemar Hansen (Wally) Elenbaas (Rotterdam, 1912) constitutes only a small part of an impressive oeuvre resulting from more than sixty years of artistic endeavour. Apart from being a photographer, Elenbaas is also a gifted painter, sculptor and printmaker. But photography was the medium with which he began his artistic career in 1929. Elenbaas was unemployed as a result of the economic depression of the period and decided that he preferred the life of a poverty-stricken artist to that of an unemployed office clerk. He joined the Dutch Association of Worker Photographers and was, like Paul Schuitema and Piet Zwart, among the artists associated with the worker writers’ collective Links Richten (‘Eyes left’). During the great depression of the 1930s, Elenbaas identified with the class struggle of the proletariat and became a ‘worker photographer’. The only one of his films from that period that has survived intact shows street scenes populated by working class victims of the depression, intercut with abstract images in the style of the New Photography: austere compositions, many diagonals, unexpected angles and striking cropping of the image.
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