The Many Lives of Erik Kessels
Erik Kessels
Aperture
Co-published by CAMERA
English
Texts by: Francesco Zanot, Hans Aarsman, Simon Baker, and Sandra S. Phillips
Hardcover
In cardboard slipcase
576 pages
215x135mm
2017
ISBN 9781597114165
The Many Lives of Erik Kessels presents the highly anticipated first illustrated survey of this pioneering and influential curator, editor, and artist whose varied experiments with photography and photographic archives have allowed us to reconsider the medium’s vernacular and narrative possibilities in today’s inundated image landscape.
“People consume photographs,” says Kessels, “they don’t look at them anymore.” This volume is a primer on how to look—and how to better understand the hybrid practice of this artist who defies categorization. Including more than twenty of the artist’s series and features essays by Simon Baker, Hans Aarsman, and curator Francesco Zanot, The Many Lives of Erik Kessels is published in conjunction with a major mid-career retrospective at Camera: Italian Centre for Photography in Turin, Italy.
About the Artist
Erik Kessels (1966) is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with a particular interest in photography, and creative director of KesselsKramer, an advertising agency in Amsterdam. Kessels and Johan Kramer established the “legendary and unorthodox” KesselsKramer in 1996, and KesselsKramer Publishing, their Amsterdam-based publishing house, both of which they continue to run.
He is “best known as a book publisher specialising in absurdist found photography”, extensively publishing his and others’ found and vernacular photography. Notable works include the long-running series Useful Photography, which he edits with others, and his own In Almost Every Picture. Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said “His magazine, Useful Photography, forgoes art and documentary for images that are purely functional. … Humour is the unifying undercurrent here as it is in KesselsKramer’s series of photo books, In Almost Every Picture”.
kesselskramer.com
About the Publisher
Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online. Created in 1952 by photographers and writers as “common ground for the advancement of photography,” Aperture today is a multi-platform publisher and center for the photo community.
aperture.org
