AMSTERDAM — The Dutch postwar photographer Ed van der Elsken lived with, and through, his cameras.

They came with him into his bedroom, capturing life with his first, second and third wives; they were slung around his neck and across his chest as he traveled to Paris, Tokyo, Chile, central Africa and back home to his native Amsterdam. They joined him in his deathbed, as he recorded his own slow capitulation to cancer in 1990.

He was “a man who would have liked to have transplanted a camera into his head to permanently record the world around him,” wrote Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Marta Gili, the director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, who have collaborated to present a major retrospective of his work for both museums.

That text comes from the preface to the catalog of the exhibition, “Ed van der Elsken — Camera in Love,” at the Stedelijk until May 21, before it moves to the Jeu de Paume, from June through September, and then to the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid.