Eccentric figure of the European art scene, Erik Kessels is driven by a deep curiosity. His immoderate taste for the most popular and the most trivial forms of photography, including images streamed on the internet, leads him to rediscover material to which we no longer pay attention. Botched, absurd and weird pictures, family albums, pornographic ads and album covers, the Dutchman born in 1966 questions, with humour and irony, as much our relationship to images as artistic practices such as salvaging, appropriation and misappropriation.
——— I won’t try to define you as a creative director, a publisher or a curator. As you said, you don’t need a label on your activities. Your entire work fit into a coherent whole where everything is connected. We’ll take that as a point of departure. Following your first retrospective exhibition The many lives of Erik Kessels, curated by Francesco Zanot [Camera, Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Turin, 2017], could you share your thoughts on the last 20 years of your ca
reer? I was schooled as a graphic designer and illustrator. In 1996, I started my own company KesselsKramer. Previously, I worked for different companies. When I was working in a London agency, I remembered Simon Larbalestier, a photographer who only did cover albums for the Pixies. I thought his covers and the music of the Pixies really went well together. One day, Simon Larbalestier's portfolio reached the agency. It opened my eyes: “Ok, I can also work with this guy who is actually doing a lot of autonomous work that he used on his albums”. That was the first time that I found out I can choose by myself. A few years later, I had the opportunity to work with Carl De Keyser from the Magnum Agency. I was very nervous but I thought it could be a nice and interesting combination (with a slight bit of friction as he was a reportage and documentary photographer and I was working for a fashion company!). At first sight, we thought that it didn’t really fit, but the work he made was very challenging and gave more authenticity to the final work. Between 1995 and 2000, I became more and more confident in working with all sorts of photographers, beginners or more established ones like Vivian Sassen, Hans van der Meer, Hans Aarsman, Jacqueline Hassink, Bertien van Manen, Dana Lixenberg etc. Suddenly, the business changed: more traditional advertising photographers disapeared. There are hardly any left anymore, at least in Holland. The work is done by photographers who occasionally do editorial, personal or commercial work, who exhibit in an art gallery or in a museum, etc. That’s how I became interested in photography from the beginning, learning more and more.The first picture I bought was a Salgado that I no longer like. I think his work is too polished, too perfect in a way. A time came when I was really annoyed by the perfection in images. Around 2000, I started to find materials in flea markets. I liked the intimacy, the naivety of those found images. I started to use some technics in my advertising work. For a campaign for example, I deliberately chose the model with the eyes closed or the mouth wide open. Stupid pictures but in a sense much more authentic. When I first bought vernacular photographs in Barcelona (the images of the Spanish woman), I kept them in my office for two years. I showed them to some friends (Julian Germain, Hans Aarsman…): “Why don’t you do something with these images, you need to take them out of context. And even tell a story with them” they said. In a way, I needed to be motivated. I showed some pictures in an art-gallery in Barcelona in 2002: it’s how the first book of the series In Almost Every
Picture started. The first reactions were positive, it surprised me. It motivated me to continue the project: to take images from something, put them in a different context and turn it into a story. The basis is the same, I’m working with photographs or with different photographers but I’m not a photographer myself. I was raised with other people pictures, to make choices, “to kill their darlings” instead of “killing my own darlings”. My first major show, Loving
your pictures, was shown at a contemporary art museum in Utrecht [Centraal Museum, 2006]. A year later, it was shown at Les Rencontres d’Arles. I was curious to see people’s reaction, as they knew me as a creative director not as a curator. People were critical, not because I was curating an exhibition but because they suddenly saw snapshots on museum’s walls (that’s how I called it). It goes without saying I was looking for provocation! In the end, it turned out that a lot of visitors were intrigued by this concept, showing photographs they could have made themselves. My career has become more and more diverse over time. For example, next week, I’m teaching in a theater school for a day, then I’m doing purely some design assignments or I’m curating a new exhibition for a festival. It’s exciting because for me, the most important is to have the space to think free in any discipline.
Let’s start at the beginning: your first book Missing Links, published in 1997 [Do Publishing, Amsterdam], is based on your Polaroid collection. Two questions come immediately to my mind: Why using Polaroid
films and why this book title? I have always taken a lot of Polaroids, and I still do. One night at my house, Julian Germain, a friend photographer, was there. I showed him the Polaroids I took and he started placing them around. He was trying to do a long stripe of images. It’s probably the best thing to do when you have a selection of images that have no link with another. They may have no connection, but when you take the time to look at them one by one, you can fill the gap between them and make your own story. It was purely an experiment.
Missing Links is the only book in which I’m credited as photographer, and it’s not even edited by me. Funny isn’t it? Recently, I published a book, Image Tsunami [RM, Barcelona, 2016]. In it there are many of my own pictures. Pictures that I took by phone and mixed with others that I found on the Internet. All the images published are uncredited and therefore are on an equal level, I like that! What is the starting point of a new project: a concept, pictures found at the flea market, a talk with an artist or an institution? My starting point is always the curiosity of finding a new story or completing an unfinished story. It’s like an investigation! I always need to find something new, something different from the previous project. But I’m not in a hurry. In the last 2 years for example, I haven’t published a new book from my se
ries In Almost Every Picture. I need to find the theme. Three books are almost ready to be published, but I’m not convinced yet. They stay on my computer because I need to be challenged or excited by the things I do. When I have a new idea and I know exactly what to do with it, everything goes fast and the book can be finished in a day or two.The process of doing or working on something and the production of it is much more exciting than when it’s there. When it’s there, it’s also difficult to enjoy it. How do you consider a book editing and an art pieces selection for an exhibition? What are the differences (and/or the similarities) between making books and making
exhibitions? I don’t think there is any similarity. As an editor and not a photographer, I feel more comfortable playing with the images. I can be more brutal with them, make more radical choices in the editing process. For instance, In Almost Every Picture looks like a novel book. It is almost entirely composed of images, with a short text at the end (the initial idea was to have a reading book with only images). Your brain has to process the visual information to get to the story. That was the concept of a book as an object. For a long time, a lot of photographers did exactly the same layout in their books and in their exhibitions (luckily, this time is past now): same images, printed, framed, lined on the wall. Doing an exhibition is more
De haut en bas / from top:
« In Almost Every Picture #13 ». Extrait du livre / from the book. KesselsKramer. 2014.
« Unfinished Father ». Fotografia Europea,
Reggio Emilia. 2015. exciting for me because I can really play with the different spaces, the lights, the smell and the sounds of the room. Every project is a new experiment and an infinity source of challenges.
SHIT AND MISTAKES The set up of your exhibitions are often unusual - I mean, it’s not a row of frames hang on white walls. You try to make people look and feel differently. The exhibition experience includes also the body and how it interacts with the work. Could you say something about this, expand on your col
laboration with set designers? This is essential for a photographic exhibition, as this art has a totally different origin from the others. There is one exception I know: The
Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen [MoMA, 1955]. When you see the exhibition installation now, it’s fantastic and bizarre. That has to do with how it’s curated and how it’s made. Everything is big and bold. During the 1980s and 1990s, photographic exhibitions were very boring, maybe because photographers were masters. That has totally changed in the last ten years with the development of major events and festivals, which created a lot of emulation. I’m much more interested in using different senses and see how visitors interact with each photograph, force them to look up or down, surprise them with the size of the pieces... You don’t always have to create a complex set up, the idea is also important. For the series of images with fingers in the front of lenses, coming from In Almost Every
Picture 13, the hanging was very traditional, even boring.This was a provocation because the pictures were shit and mistakes. But it was nice to have them framed and hung beautifully, in a perfect gallery space. There is always something you can come up with. And offer the people a different perspective. In September 2017, whenThomas Mailaender and I curated The Pleasure Palace [Unseen, Amsterdam], many visitors were a bit shocked at first. They thought we were disrespectful with the images [visitors could throw stones at the images or get a picture tattooed...], but that was not our intention. Our intention was to play with the images and think about the role of each of them in an alternative way. When some visitors came back, they kind of laugh about those images. That was our first intention! Humor and irony, are essential ingredients according to you. The boundary could be
tricky between “laugh with somebody” and “make fun of somebody.” Do you im
pose limit to yourself? You describe it as an ingredient, which is good. But for me the starting point should never be “how could I make fun of something?” When I realized the project about my sister [ My Sister, video, in
Five Strange Family Albums, Le Bal, Paris, 2011] or the project with my father [ Unfini
shed Father, Fotografica Europea, Reggio Emilia, 2015], there was nothing funny about them, but touching maybe. When the exhibition with my father was on display, I spent two hours looking for people’s reactions. There were a lot of emotions. That’s simply what I like. With this personal exhibition, I wanted to touch people (but no pity for me or for my father). As soon as people felt something related to their own family or story, it worked. I like to work with any kind of emotions, along with the images.You can do a lot with that. Sometimes, of course, it’s just the artwork itself. In 2017 in Wroclaw, I did an installation of one image of my sister. My parents had this photograph in their house since always. It was the last picture of her. The entire family was in the original photo (me, my father, my mother and her) and it was in color. This image was taken by an anonymous photographer while we were sitting on a terrace in a holiday park. When my sister died, my parents looked everywhere to find it. They cropped it to focus only on my sister, then they printed an enlarged black and white image of it and framed it. It was not a very interesting picture, but it was meaningful for the three of us. So, I have decided to only exhibit this picture during the festival and see how the public would react. The picture was published on a billboard, on a newspaper (without any text) and was given for free as poster in the library. The image was also shown in a museum where the story was revealed. I wanted to focus people on one single enigmatic image and see their reactions.
FAMILY PROPAGANDA You said that a collection is something dead, nothing happens there. You just see it as a source of materials to tell a story or a different story. How did the show Mother Nature and Album Beauty curated from
your collection started? A long time ago, the Rijksmuseum curator of Photography invited me to look at some albums in beautiful rooms and cabinets. The photographs were very well protected, we wore white gloves to handle them, etc. Photographs or albums are sometimes admired only for their covers or their beauty when they should be admired for what they represent. There is a funny thing about the Photographic department at the Rijksmuseum: the curator bought some photographs on eBay for 5 euros for the collection, only because he likes them! These pieces didn’t have a great value but there were very exciting (and obviously their value will change now that they are part of a museum collection!). Two days after, I was in Brussels on a flea market at 6 o’clock. It was raining and the albums were getting wet. To be honest, some albums were far more interesting in the market than in the museum. I’m more interested in the image content than in the fact that it should be protected, conserved and stored at a certain temperature or whatever. The exhibitions Album Beauty [a visual anthropology of the photo albums; FOAM, Amsterdam, 2011; Les Rencontres de la photographies, Arles, 2013] and Mother Nature [photographs of women posing in front of flowered backgrounds; in (Mis)Understan
ding Photography, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2014] had a concept as the starting point. With that in mind I turned to my personal archive and looked through all the family albums to find things to fit the concept. The content by others is curated as my own work. In an interview, you expressed the idea that vernacular photographs had an aesthetic we were not used to. Yet, even if today we are, as you say, more and more capable of making perfect images, we have always been surrounded with vernacular photographs (our own family albums for example). Maybe what we are not used to it’s to see this kind of photographs exhibited in a museum? Yes, exactly. If I said that, in a way, it was a contradiction. People are used to looking at this type of images as they already have family albums at home, but they are no longer paying attention. At least, not consciously. Take the context out of an image, blow it up, add sound or whatever you want: it would force the people to look at it differently.
According to a study by Linda Henkel in 2013, an American researcher in psychology, taking photos would be harmful to memory: the memory no longer plays its role because we use the camera or smartphone as a crutch to remember objects or events at our place.To remember, you have to interact with the photos in making albums for example, not just collect them without classifying. Give a second life to some found photography, is it ultimately a
way for you to fight against forgetting? It’s totally true especially today: the moment you look at a picture is often the moment right after you took it. You don’t even come back on it very often, it stays on your phone. Some are shared with friends or relatives. The way people take and consider selfies is a good illustration of this process: they don’t really care about the picture itself. What matters is the proof that they have been there; pictures or it didn’t happen. Was it not the same with the family albums? No one really looked through them anymore. Sometimes, it was out the bookshelf on a family member’s visit, to show him the happiness in the family. I think it should be considered more as family propaganda. For me, this is different because when I look at these kinds of materials, I know instantly what to do with it. « In Almost Every Picture #8 ». L’image du lapin est extraite du livre réunissant des photographies de / the picture of the rabbit is taken from the book gathering photographs by Hironori Akutagawa.
KesselsKramer. 2009.