Erik Kessels on Pictorial Behaviour
I am on the phone with the artist-designer Erik Kessels. He is travelling to Milan for his exhibition As Far as You Can See at Commerce gallery. Opening June 18th, he will present all 106 vernacular photography books he has made since 1997. The latest is Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch, a collection of nearly two thousand found photographs archiving the human desire to put a hand on things, from airplanes and bushes, to statues and windowsills. Like many of Kessels’ photography books, the book seems absurd and almost humorous at first glance, but as you turn the pages the rhythms of the patterns Kessels displays become more vivid, and the project takes on a profound weightiness as an insightful commentary on the human condition. Already in its second edition, only three months after its first release, I ask Kessels about the encyclopedia’s origins.
ERIK KESSELS I have a storage unit close to Amsterdam with around 15,000 family albums. They aren’t photographs of my family but other people’s. It’s not really an archive because it isn’t an organised collection.I think of it more like a reservoir of photographs that I draw from when I have an idea. For instance, there is an image on the cover of the encyclopedia of a person touching a pole in the middle of a field: there is a pole, somebody poses next to it, touches it, and takes a photograph. It’s very strange. I look at that and think to myself that maybe there are more of these kinds of photographs. I have an antenna for interesting images. I trust my instinct when they pass by. So I end up defining these new categories and then organising the materials in line with those categories, in this case the category of ‘touch’. When I am doing this, I am reappropriating the photographs. I am taking them out of their original context and putting them in a different context that reveals new patterns, sequences, stories. I am not doing it as a way to offer answers or solutions. I am just observing and asking: What is this? Why do we do this? Are we taking ownership of the things we touch? Are we measuring ourselves against the objects that we live with? In that sense, these books I make with subjects like ashtrays, reading naked, shitting, or posing with trees are a kind of visual anthropology.
JAMED DYER You often describe these photographs as “vernacular”. What do you mean by that?
EK Just that they are ordinary, everyday photographs. Frankly, the vast majority of them are very boring. There is nothing much happening in these family albums beyond predictable, stereotypical scenes. But then again, there can be something very nice in that too. I looked through five hours of home video footage filmed by my father using a Super 8 camera. Each roll can only hold three minutes of footage so that’s a lot of rolls of film. He mostly filmed mountains. I just couldn’t understand why with a camera designed to record movement, he would film a mountain; there is nothing happening. Only for a few minutes of the five hours he filmed me and my sister, which makes it a really special few minutes. My sister died when I was 11 years old. She was 9. The footage is of us playing ping pong. I like to think about these things, about what they are and what they mean. I made a film about it called My Sister.
JD Collecting is a common theme in design, particularly graphic design. I think it’s a way of acknowledging and taking care of things that are often short-lived and overlooked. I am thinking of Andy Altman’s tat*, Ed Fella’s Letters on America and many of Daniel Eatock's Ongoing projects. Do you think these sorts of collections need to do anything other than just be a collection?
EK For me, it’s important to make something with the materials collected and this encyclopedia—with its volume, its design, its incompleteness—is just one of many ways to do that. I made a book in 2022 called A Pictorial History of the Empty Chair. It’s a fake history made out of real pictures. In each photograph you see that there is always an empty chair. It looks very dramatic, as if somebody had died or was missing or something like that, but actually it’s the chair of the photographer. When the photographer stands to take the picture, they are also stepping out of the image and leaving behind an empty chair in the frame. Part of what makes the piece a convincing work for me is not only the book but also the chair that comes with it. I designed it to have a shelf underneath the seat that holds the book. You kind of buy the book for two hundred euros and you get a free chair with it.
The way that a collection is presented really matters to how the material is related to and understood. For instance, I am working on a book now called MAN. It is small compared to the encyclopedia, about the size of a postcard, but it is really thick. The spine is about six centimetres. Printed on the back is the letter M, on the spine is the A, and on the cover is the N. This collection is about how “man” makes himself the centre of attention. In every photograph is a man flanked by women; first it is one woman on the left and right, then it goes to two, three, four women on each side, all the way up to nineteen women on each side of one man. The book has almost a thousand pages. Because of the type of binding and the thickness of the book, when you try and open it you can barely even see the man. He disappears into the gutter, which is a joke in itself because that would normally be considered a design flaw, a mistake, but here it is completely intentional.
JD Do you think that this absurdist humour is an important part of your vernacular projects?
EK I don’t set out to be funny, the starting point is much more sincere than that. Then again, sometimes things can be both funny and weirdly tragic at the same time. In my book In Almost Every Picture #9 a family fails to photograph their black dog. It always looks like a phantom in the image, like a cut-out silhouette. It is really funny, of course, but it is also a tragic twelve-year-long failure. These are the sorts of things I like to pause over and think about and talk about. We live in a time when we see so many images, we consume them rapidly, like fast food, we hardly look at them anymore. So it’s quite nice—if a bit unusual—to pause over some of them.
JD We are so aware now of how to become an image, but maybe we lack the understanding of what it means to be an image.
EK We are very aware now of how we present ourselves in images. Look at any 10 year old person when their picture is being taken. They know exactly how to stand, where to look, and so on. They have trained by looking online at all of these images, they are very savvy, you see it in their posture, you see it in everything, the mannerisms, the attitudes. Almost all of the photographs in the encyclopedia are analogue. They were unaware of the visual language of photographs to this same degree. They almost look a little clumsy in the photos. When we take photos now, we snap and then immediately look at the outcome, then we delete what we don’t like, change our pose slightly, and then take another. In this sense, we are “making” photographs, not “taking” them.
JD Beyond touch, what other kinds of pictorial behaviours do you see in the encyclopedia?
EK I also see a lot of typical male and female things, which is not strange for the time, of course. For instance there are a lot of photographs of women touching curtains, but I have only found one picture of a man touching a curtain. With analogue photography, it was often the man in the relationship that would take the photograph. The camera was a technical object, something to fiddle with. It was a macho thing. Luckily that has changed now. Actually, I have one particular album in storage where there are an enormous amount of photos of a man, just one man, touching things. He is also in the encyclopaedia. It’s a gay couple’s photo album.
JD In the encyclopedia, I like the photographs where the photographer and the photographed change roles. There is something revealing in knowing who is standing in the hidden place, behind the camera.
EK In volume seventeen of In Almost Every Picture I have this Italian couple that does exactly that. They photographed each other through their lives; she takes a picture of him, he takes a picture of her. They are always in exactly the same position. It's bizarre. Another thing I have noticed is when a husband photographs his wife for a long time, over decades, you see that the woman becomes smaller and smaller in the image. I guess it is just because they depart from each other. In the beginning, when they first met, he (usually he) takes loving close-up photos, at the end of their lives together, she is really small in the background of the image because he probably had more eye for the surroundings or she didn’t want to be photographed so close up anymore. There is a lot of strange behaviour in images. The images that we live with now feel like they have already been categorised and they are categorised in ways that we are already very familiar with—portrait, landscape, selfie, food photographs, etc.—which makes us feel like they don’t need investigation. But if you take a single image and you sit with it for a while, you can see other, and more interesting stories can be told. It’s something we should do more often, and it’s a kind of work that is never complete.
ERIK KESSELS I have a storage unit close to Amsterdam with around 15,000 family albums. They aren’t photographs of my family but other people’s. It’s not really an archive because it isn’t an organised collection.I think of it more like a reservoir of photographs that I draw from when I have an idea. For instance, there is an image on the cover of the encyclopedia of a person touching a pole in the middle of a field: there is a pole, somebody poses next to it, touches it, and takes a photograph. It’s very strange. I look at that and think to myself that maybe there are more of these kinds of photographs. I have an antenna for interesting images. I trust my instinct when they pass by. So I end up defining these new categories and then organising the materials in line with those categories, in this case the category of ‘touch’. When I am doing this, I am reappropriating the photographs. I am taking them out of their original context and putting them in a different context that reveals new patterns, sequences, stories. I am not doing it as a way to offer answers or solutions. I am just observing and asking: What is this? Why do we do this? Are we taking ownership of the things we touch? Are we measuring ourselves against the objects that we live with? In that sense, these books I make with subjects like ashtrays, reading naked, shitting, or posing with trees are a kind of visual anthropology.
JAMED DYER You often describe these photographs as “vernacular”. What do you mean by that?
EK Just that they are ordinary, everyday photographs. Frankly, the vast majority of them are very boring. There is nothing much happening in these family albums beyond predictable, stereotypical scenes. But then again, there can be something very nice in that too. I looked through five hours of home video footage filmed by my father using a Super 8 camera. Each roll can only hold three minutes of footage so that’s a lot of rolls of film. He mostly filmed mountains. I just couldn’t understand why with a camera designed to record movement, he would film a mountain; there is nothing happening. Only for a few minutes of the five hours he filmed me and my sister, which makes it a really special few minutes. My sister died when I was 11 years old. She was 9. The footage is of us playing ping pong. I like to think about these things, about what they are and what they mean. I made a film about it called My Sister.
JD Collecting is a common theme in design, particularly graphic design. I think it’s a way of acknowledging and taking care of things that are often short-lived and overlooked. I am thinking of Andy Altman’s tat*, Ed Fella’s Letters on America and many of Daniel Eatock's Ongoing projects. Do you think these sorts of collections need to do anything other than just be a collection?
EK For me, it’s important to make something with the materials collected and this encyclopedia—with its volume, its design, its incompleteness—is just one of many ways to do that. I made a book in 2022 called A Pictorial History of the Empty Chair. It’s a fake history made out of real pictures. In each photograph you see that there is always an empty chair. It looks very dramatic, as if somebody had died or was missing or something like that, but actually it’s the chair of the photographer. When the photographer stands to take the picture, they are also stepping out of the image and leaving behind an empty chair in the frame. Part of what makes the piece a convincing work for me is not only the book but also the chair that comes with it. I designed it to have a shelf underneath the seat that holds the book. You kind of buy the book for two hundred euros and you get a free chair with it.
The way that a collection is presented really matters to how the material is related to and understood. For instance, I am working on a book now called MAN. It is small compared to the encyclopedia, about the size of a postcard, but it is really thick. The spine is about six centimetres. Printed on the back is the letter M, on the spine is the A, and on the cover is the N. This collection is about how “man” makes himself the centre of attention. In every photograph is a man flanked by women; first it is one woman on the left and right, then it goes to two, three, four women on each side, all the way up to nineteen women on each side of one man. The book has almost a thousand pages. Because of the type of binding and the thickness of the book, when you try and open it you can barely even see the man. He disappears into the gutter, which is a joke in itself because that would normally be considered a design flaw, a mistake, but here it is completely intentional.
JD Do you think that this absurdist humour is an important part of your vernacular projects?
EK I don’t set out to be funny, the starting point is much more sincere than that. Then again, sometimes things can be both funny and weirdly tragic at the same time. In my book In Almost Every Picture #9 a family fails to photograph their black dog. It always looks like a phantom in the image, like a cut-out silhouette. It is really funny, of course, but it is also a tragic twelve-year-long failure. These are the sorts of things I like to pause over and think about and talk about. We live in a time when we see so many images, we consume them rapidly, like fast food, we hardly look at them anymore. So it’s quite nice—if a bit unusual—to pause over some of them.
JD We are so aware now of how to become an image, but maybe we lack the understanding of what it means to be an image.
EK We are very aware now of how we present ourselves in images. Look at any 10 year old person when their picture is being taken. They know exactly how to stand, where to look, and so on. They have trained by looking online at all of these images, they are very savvy, you see it in their posture, you see it in everything, the mannerisms, the attitudes. Almost all of the photographs in the encyclopedia are analogue. They were unaware of the visual language of photographs to this same degree. They almost look a little clumsy in the photos. When we take photos now, we snap and then immediately look at the outcome, then we delete what we don’t like, change our pose slightly, and then take another. In this sense, we are “making” photographs, not “taking” them.
JD Beyond touch, what other kinds of pictorial behaviours do you see in the encyclopedia?
EK I also see a lot of typical male and female things, which is not strange for the time, of course. For instance there are a lot of photographs of women touching curtains, but I have only found one picture of a man touching a curtain. With analogue photography, it was often the man in the relationship that would take the photograph. The camera was a technical object, something to fiddle with. It was a macho thing. Luckily that has changed now. Actually, I have one particular album in storage where there are an enormous amount of photos of a man, just one man, touching things. He is also in the encyclopaedia. It’s a gay couple’s photo album.
JD In the encyclopedia, I like the photographs where the photographer and the photographed change roles. There is something revealing in knowing who is standing in the hidden place, behind the camera.
EK In volume seventeen of In Almost Every Picture I have this Italian couple that does exactly that. They photographed each other through their lives; she takes a picture of him, he takes a picture of her. They are always in exactly the same position. It's bizarre. Another thing I have noticed is when a husband photographs his wife for a long time, over decades, you see that the woman becomes smaller and smaller in the image. I guess it is just because they depart from each other. In the beginning, when they first met, he (usually he) takes loving close-up photos, at the end of their lives together, she is really small in the background of the image because he probably had more eye for the surroundings or she didn’t want to be photographed so close up anymore. There is a lot of strange behaviour in images. The images that we live with now feel like they have already been categorised and they are categorised in ways that we are already very familiar with—portrait, landscape, selfie, food photographs, etc.—which makes us feel like they don’t need investigation. But if you take a single image and you sit with it for a while, you can see other, and more interesting stories can be told. It’s something we should do more often, and it’s a kind of work that is never complete.
Images courtesy of the artist.
