Four&Sons

Trash and treasure

BY Mel Cousipetcos and Campbell Boyer, April 2, 2012

Erik Kessels is one half of KesselsKramer Publishing. He rescues orphan photo albums, is interested in rookie errors and wants to unearth and share untold stories. Thankfully, he had the good sense to let his hobby for collecting images spill over into his professional work so we all could experience his unique take on the world. Whether the subject matter revolves around dogs, animals, people or all of the above, there is always an unlikely discovery waiting for you at the end. We talk to Erik about the In almost every picture series and his love of amateur photography.

How did the idea for publishing the ‘In almost every picture’ series come about?
About ten years ago at a flea market in Barcelona, I found 400 slides which were very beautifully preserved and it started to rain on them so I just bought them. I didn’t really look at them apart from the fact that I saw that were 6×6 inch images and it was shame to let them get rained on. When I took them home I found that about 90% of these images had a woman standing in them. In the end it was about 12-13 years of a husband documenting his wife during their holidays. It took maybe a few years but then I made a book out of it. And that was also very nice to look at because, in the beginning of those years she is quite big in the frame, but then when you flick through the book she becomes smaller and smaller in the frame and the husband has more an eye for the surroundings. As the years pass, the wife disappears more and more into the background.

That’s interesting, that a story over time is revealed even though all the pictures in the book are of the exact same subject.
Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for – a certain repetition in the images, but apart from that I’m looking for a special story which is mostly created over the years without people knowing it. So its mostly amateurs that take those pictures, and they don’t know in the end what kind of treasure they have or what kind of funny or bizarre story they’re telling.

For the second book, I found about 700 images by a taxi driver. He had a client who he regularly drove for three or four-day trips though Austria, Germany and Switzerland. On those trips the driver always stepped out of his car and photographed his Mercedes taxi all around those countries. It was very strange because in all 700 images the woman stayed in the car. She was always in the passenger seat, so its a very strange series of photographs of a taxi either with the door open or not. In the end I found out that the woman was handicapped, so in the morning he would pick her up in the car and drive her around, and in a way he made her holiday pictures. The only thing was that the Mercedes was always around her. So there’s always those kind of stories hidden in the pictures.

How did you find out about who took the photos and their stories?  
For instance when I did the first book with the Spanish woman, I had an exhibition and did a poster and invitation with her image on it, saying ‘if you recognise this woman can you please come to the gallery’. About two weeks later an older woman came to the gallery and told me that she knew the woman, who died about 15 years ago and her husband a few years later. They never had children so that’s why these images ended up in a market, which is often the case. The families who take these photos don’t have children or their children live far away so the album gets lost and ends up at a flea market or on ebay. So they are kind of orphan albums.

What do you like so much about amateur photography?
Well I’m an art director and designer working with imagery every day, editing images and working a lot with photographers. In most cases in advertising images, everything is perfect. But for me its also inspiring how I can change things a bit. It sometimes also quite nice that somebody has his eyes closed in an advertising photograph, because in the end that will be more recognisable. I’m very interested in the mistakes and errors that amateurs make.

Given there are two ‘dog books’ in the series, do you have a particular interest in dogs? Or animals in general, because there is also the book with the rabbit, the piglet, the deer…?
No, not really, that’s kind of a coincidence. The only living subjects are people and animals. And people like to photograph animals as well. In family albums the funny thing is that people are often the least portrayed in family albums. When they go on holiday they take numerous photographs of boring mountains or waterfalls or motor homes. Those kind of photos are in a way very boring. When they have a pet they do that as well. The book with the dalmatian dog, it was an album which the woman totally dedicated to that dalmatian for 15 years. The edit is chronological. There’s not so much a story here but in the middle of the book you see that the woman tried a roll of black and white film. So she thought ‘OK, I have a black and white dog, so I’ll try a little bit of artistic photography and take black and white photos’ which is kind of funny. That was also a specific section in the album as well.

So that was a very deliberate set of images as opposed to people who don’t realise they’re making a collection?  
Yeah, and it was also a German album. The German and the Swiss albums are so neatly and precisely put down, its a cliché but its true. If you see South American albums, its chaos. In the other book with the black dog, they were again in an album, and you see that the family is trying to solve one of the big mysteries of photography — how to shoot a black dog. [It’s worth nothing here that in most of the shots the dog looks like a dense black blob]. They failed all their life in a way, until the image on the last page where they totally over exposed the shot.

Have you ever created your own ‘In almost every picture series’ and what would the subject be?
In a way I do that a little bit already. We have children and when they were young they had a weakness where they’d get lot of bloody noses, like 2-3 times week, and I always photographed them like that, either with a black eye or bloody nose or when they were crying. So I photograph these kind of misfortunate moments in a family, which I found out later that I had a lot of them because I always took a Polaroid of those moments. When I showed them to people they were very confronting, because immediately people would think ‘child abuse’, but that makes it also very interesting because it reveals how programmed we are. All family photos are really a form of propaganda. If you photograph your family they’re always smiling, happy, its beautiful with a bright blue sky. So there’s never an off moment. So that is more my own subject for my own family album.

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Images collected and edited by Erik Kessels
To see the complete catalogue of titles published, click here

Tags Amsterdam, Art, Book, Collection, Culture, Design, Editorial, Gifts, KesselsKramer, KK Outlet, London, Photography, Product, Publishing