Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels (1966) is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with a particular interest in photography, and co-founder 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.

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".

Kessels was born in Roermond, Netherlands and grew up in the adjacent village Swalmen.

He collects photographs he finds on flea markets, fairs, in junk shops, and online, and appropriates and re-contextualises them.

He extensively publishes his and others' found and vernacular photography through KesselsKramer Publishing.

KesselsKramer is an independent, advertising agency established by Kessels and Johan Kramer in 1996.

It is based in Amsterdam with offices in London and Los Angeles, and a staff of about fifty.

KesselsKramer has been called "legendary and unorthodox".

Its notable advertising campaigns have been "The Worst Hotel In The World" for Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam, and "I Amsterdam" for the city of Amsterdam.

KesselsKramer Publishing is an Amsterdam-based publishing house.

It produces books on photography, art, and some fiction.

KesselsKramer only publishes works created in house by its own staff.

Kessels' work is held in the following public collection:

Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "Kessels made his name as a champion of found photography, seeking out discarded family albums in order to show us anew their mundane beauty and oddness. He is best known for his magazine Useful Photography, which celebrates images of the purely functional, and his series of books In Almost Every Picture, which home in on motifs that appear accidentally in amateur photo albums – such as wayward fingers. ... More recently, Kessels has become “more and more interested in the stories of the photographs" rather than the images themselves." His most successful publication is In Almost Every Picture 7. Parr and Badger include In Almost Every Picture 4 (2006) in the third volume of their photobook history. In it they say "Erik Kessels is one of the guiding lights behind the magazine Useful Photography, edited by a group of (mainly) Dutch photographers in a witty yet serious manner.

In his ongoing series In Almost Every Picture, he continues his exploration of the found snapshot as a solo author.

The idea in this series is to gather together a group of snapshots devoted to a theme and treat them as if the photographers were vernacular "conceptual" artists – which in a sense they are."

Notable works include the long-running series Useful Photography, which he edits with others, and his own In Almost Every Picture. Among the works he published through other publishers are Een Idee aub (2012) about creativity on command, Failed it (2016) about turning mistakes into brilliant ideas and The Many Lives of Erik Kessels (2017), an overview of his work so far.

In 2015 Kessels was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, for Unfinished Father, along with Trevor Paglen, Laura El-Tantawy, and Tobias Zielony.

Kessels' exhibition Destroy My Face, as part of the BredaPhoto 2020 festival in the Netherlands, was met with widespread criticism on social media of misogyny, and was eventually removed by the venue, Pier15 Skatepark.

The work, which Kessels describes as an "interactive work", consists of composite portraits created by an algorithm based on images on the internet of people who have undergone plastic and cosmetic surgery.

The photos of women's faces were printed as sticker folie and affixed to the floor surface of the skatepark, where visitors could contribute to the destruction of the faces through the activity of skating over the prints.

After the festival opened on 9 September 2020, an open letter to the festival and the skatepark, signed by artists, designers, photographers, and other creatives under the name We Are Not A Playground, described the work and its implementation as misogynistic.

Within only a few days, as of 14 September 2020, the letter had collected more than 2000 signatures.