Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-des-Près [Love on the Left Bank] is one of the most important books in the history of photography in the Netherlands. It was first published in 1956 by De Bezige Bij and heralded the breakthrough of Ed van der Elsken. The photographer uses a cinematographic sequence of texts and grainy black-and-white photographs to tell a semi-autobiographical love story: the story of Manuel and Ann, situated in the bleak atmosphere of postwar Paris in the 1950s. Van der Elsken follows Ann with his camera on her wanderings through Paris, while she dances, drinks, flirts, fights, sleeps, falls in love… Ann is the legendary bohemian Vali Myers, an Australian artist who was a friend of Cocteau and Genet, but Van der Elsken makes it clear from the start that ‘the action of the book and the characters who play a part in it are the product of the author’s imagination’. This cult book has been virtually unavailable until now.