Mother Nature
Erik Kessels
RVB Books
Hardcover
140 pages
130×210 mm
2014
ISBN 979-10-90306-26-4
As a way of continuing the work he started in Album Beauty, Erik Kessels brings us new artwork, based on his own collection of photographs. In Mother Nature, he assembles photographs of women posing in front of flowered spaces, which include flowerbeds in public and private gardens, fields and beyond. This universal theme, which he identified within his own photo collection, allows us to observe repetition and difference, which weave through yielding a common narrative. The book gives us the opportunity to move between places, times, generations and cultures. The individual stories and the foreign faces create a whole within which we see our common and immutable practices. In his book, Erik Kessels renders these private photographs visible anew, creating a visual anthropology of lived moments.
He might not shoot pictures himself, but the Dutch art director and collector Erik Kessels has certainly changed the way we think about photography. As a curator of amateur photography, he’s elevated discarded images to gallery status, finding beauty and insight in pictures of, say, 20th century German police uniforms, or one woman’s lifelong love of fairground shooting galleries.
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