Erik Kessels

In the 1960s and 70s, the town of Baile Tusnad in Romania was famous for holidays and weekends enjoying the town’s hot springs and spas. The pictures tourists often took home would depict the German Sheperd dog of the local photographer George Nitescu. A unique star in almost every picture taken home from Baile Tusnad.
Hours after capturing the moment, pictures could be collected from the dog’s home; photographer Nitescu’s urban villa – a place where the tourists mingled with the locals.
The pictures in the book show changing faces, the past sights of a Romanian city in its prime, and one photogenic German Shepherd dog without a name.

Erik Kessels & Valentin Forgoros

Edited and designed by Erik Kessels.

This is a short history of photography’s most common mistake: part of the photographer’s hand appearing in frame. These pages trace an error that hasn’t dimmed with the digital era, but appears as widespread now as it was back in the form’s black-and-white prehistory.

Our tour covers family snaps from the standard “say cheese” portrait to a straight-laced grandmother playing a very un­-straight laced game of poker. It encompasses holiday snaps and seventies hair and smiles soaked in decades-old sunshine. But whoever they are, whenever they are, our subjects are weirdly cropped by thumbs, sometimes fingers, occasionally a whole palm. Digits loom massive; mysterious blurs like a ghost or UFO drifting into shot.

Trois hommes du nom d’Erik envisagent de se rencontrer depuis longtemps. Le problème est qu’un Erik vit aux Pays-Bas, l’autre en Allemagne et le troisième au Brésil. C’est pourquoi les Eriks commencèrent par s’envoyer des images de tables, chacune étant potentiellement la table autour de laquelle se rencontrer. De nombreuses images de tables plus tard, les Eriks ne sont toujours jamais rencontrés.

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Three men named Erik have planned to meet for a long time. The problem is that one Erik lives in The Netherlands, one in Germany, and one in Brazil. So the Eriks began exchanging pictures of tables; each one a possible table at which to meet. Many, many pictures of tables later, and the Eriks still haven’t met.

Dans la continuité d’Album Beauty, Erik Kessels propose un nouvel ouvrage à partir de sa propre collection de photographies. Pour Mother Nature, il rassemble des photographies de femmes posant devant des espaces fleuris : parterres de fleurs dans des jardins publics, jardins privés, champs… De ce thème universel qu’il a isolé parmi les photos trouvées, se joue une répétition et une différence qui parviennent à tisser un fil narratif commun. Le livre nous fait passer d’un lieu, d’un temps, d’une génération, d’une culture à une autre, et ces histoires particulières, ces visages étrangers composent un ensemble dans lequel transparaissent nos pratiques communes et immuables.
A travers son édition et sa mise en page, Erik Kessels donne une nouvelle visibilité à ces photographies privées, et dessine une anthropologie visuelle à partir de ces instants vécus.

LOVING YOUR PICTURES

Collected & edited by Erik Kessels. Texts by Erik Kessels and Pauline Terreehorst. Design by Angela Lidderdale.

The collected photographic work of Erik Kessels questions matters such as authenticity, originality, authorship, craftsmanship and the role of the image in current society. While impressive glossy, professional photos dominate many magazines, today everyone is a photographer. Images are exchanged evermore rapidly aided by the development of digital photography.

Every picture can be experienced in many different ways: as a memory of a special moment, as a registration of an event or as a piece of art with aesthetic value. The photographs, which the original makers did not intend as ‘works of art’, take on new meanings as they are brought together in this postcard book. By using the found photographs as a postcard they will get an unexpected, second life.

The continual and necessary recording of life’s travels is explicit here in the photographs taken by a Taxi Driver of his Taxi and his Passenger, who is always the same Person, as they make their way from place to place. The Passenger’s physical disability required him to drive her long distances in his Taxi and created the opportunity to combine business with sightseeing.
In Almost Every Picture, we see the Passenger and the Taxi in a new location, a place where they have traveled to, or through, or by, on their way. The images are holiday photos taken with a strict criterion : the Taxi and Passenger must always be there too. We see dramatic mountain landscapes, fields, sunsets, city squares, highway rest stops, all photographed with the Taxi and Passenger, as if to say : « I have been here. Because of this Passenger. And I I am here because of this car. This Taxi. You have to believe me. This is where we were. »

The mustached man with the old school Panasonic is Larbi Laaraichi. He lives in Fez, Morocco, a city where lots of people get married. We can assume this because Larbi has made a career as a wedding cameraman.
The images you see in this book are reproductions of advertisements covering the walls in his shop. They are proudly displayed next to Larbi’s filmmaking credentials: a diploma from Kodak, presented on the 26th of May, 1993, in Casablanca.
While these images were designed to sell Larbi’s services, they also provide an insight into the man himself.

In almost every picture #9 is the latest addition to the long running series of found photography. This time around, we are presented with the peculiar story of one family’s attempts to photograph its black dog. « Attempts » being the operative word.

Unfortunately, their camera’s limitations mean that the canine appears, time after time, as only a vague black blob. The all black dog shape is seen posed in all kinds of domestic situations, usually with his owners as part of a tableaux of homely contentment.
But while these contexts make it clear that the silhouetted pooch is an integral part of this family’s life, it’s equally clear that there’s no situation capable of providing the requisite amount of light.

– Erik Kessels & Michel Campeau
This edition is the result of a strange detective story, initiated by photographer Michel Campeau. While clearing out his mother’s house, Campeau discovered a strange image amongst her possessions: a piglet in a restaurant, being fed milk by a customer. Some time later, he stumbled across another, similar picture by accident. Intrigued Campeau decided to seek out more of these piglet mascots. His quest yielded over 200 images, the most striking of which are collected here. This is a book of obsessions; both Campeau’s own and that of the original piglet snapper. All pictures are taken in restaurant ‘Au Lutin Qui Bouffe’ in Montreal led by patron Mr McAbbie.

– Erik Kessels & Hironori Akutagawa
Collected & edited by Erik Kessels, photographs by Hironori Akutagawa, text by Christian Bunyan.
In almost every picture #8 continues this well-established series of found photography books. Its subject is one of the earliest successful photo blogs, a site documenting the story of Oolong, a Japanese rabbit whose unusually flat head made it ideal for balancing objects. Starting in 1999, hundreds of images were posted by Oolong’s owner, Hironori Akutagawa, each showing this otherwise ordinary creature with an unusual item placed squarely on his skull. The items in question range from rabbit bones to cakes, teapots and other household objects, always shot in low res, almost always from the same angle. Now in book form, Oolong’s images chart the story of a unique friendship between man and bunny.