Van der Elsken arrived in Paris in 1950 and found his own kind among a group of bohemians in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In the manner of a private journal he photographed their every move, and above all those of the red-haired Vali Myers.

His story mixes fiction with fact and set up a new kind of publication, the photo-novel. Rebuilding how that book was made, from material never shown before — contact sheets, dummies, sketches, colour prints, annotated maps of Paris — reveals not only the nihilist mood of a youth steeped in the postwar existentialist climate, but also how cinematic the layout is.

Out of all that material a fiction has been drawn that lies over the original account he developed in Love on the Left Bank. The visual narrative comes with a text by Tamara Berghmans, curator at the FoMu in Antwerp, who wrote her thesis on the book.