Erik Kessels

Piece for Dazed and Confused on an excellent Dutch editor who makes books about vernacular pictures of Dalmatians and shooting galleries, thinks that there is something interesting in mistakes.


Erik Kessels is Creative Director at an amazingly interesting communications agency called KesselsKramer. Did you ever see that "I AMsterdam" campaign? That was them. As well as their advertising and design work, they make films, publish books and stage exhibitions. These books are always wonderful and often really funny and can be bought from their website, www.kesselskramerpublishing.com.

One of these – in almost every picture, a series celebrating found photos – caught our eye. Each book in the series is a collection of photographs sourced from flea markets, the internet and from found photo albums, "vernacular" pictures taken by "amateur" photographers. A family's library of pictures of its mischievous Dalmatian formed edition #5, a woman's record of 60 years of passport pictures formed #6, and #1 was a collection of remarkably consistent shots of a wife by her husband on holiday in Barcelona. They are getting quite famous and have been exhibited in Arles, Barcelona, New York and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Of course, like all vernacular photography, the joy of the shots is in the unsaid, anonymous nature of the photos and the stories you makeup to go along with them. But the genius of Erik and his team is the way that they draw the pictures together and the links between the pictures themselves: creating books that document, record and cross art, social history and personal biography. So, anyway, the books are in equal measure clever, tongue in cheek and tenderly humane and we emailed some questions over earlier. This is what he wrote back.

What is it that attracts you to vernacular photography?

Working in advertising means dealing with a lot of images that don’t appear to contain much of the real world. When I first discovered vernacular photography, I was struck by the freshness and naivety of its images, the amateurism of their composition, and the way in which the photographers make sometimes quite beautiful.

In a way, our work in both communications and books is a reaction against the hyperrealism of most commercial work. As a company, KesselsKramer aims to find something authentic in the things it makes. Even in the most commercial of posters, we always attempt to find a feeling of authenticity.

What makes an “in almost every” photo?

Mostly, it’s when the photo comprises part of a series that together form a certain story. These photographs were never intended to make a series, the people making them were entirely innocent of that goal. Nowadays, you see photo series appearing everywhere, particularly on blogs, but the difference is that blog series are created in order to be viewed as a whole. The books we publish contain images never intended to be arranged as a narrative and bound. This means they have a certain naïve, unforced quality.

How did you begin this quest?

I was once in a flea-market in Barcelona, surrounded by vases, secondhand mugs, all the usual paraphernalia you find in those places, but nothing you could call really personal. Then I saw 400 or so images on the ground, abandoned, a whole life story in pictures. It began to rain then so I saved them all.

How/where do you find the pictures?

All kinds of places: flea-market, the internet… I also have images sent to me by people who have heard of previous books.

What links the series?

There’s a high level of amateurism, of course, but it’s also about how each book demonstrates a unique pattern forming a unique story. There’s also an element of chance at the heart of each book’s creation. What I mean is: I never know when the next book will come along because it depends on when the next interesting item will surface.

Am I right in thinking that some series are by one photographer, some by several?

The book dealing with the Spanish woman and that dealing with the taxi driver are by the one photographer. The book about twins was shot by several photographers; professionals who specialized in taking pictures on promenades in the last century. In three of our issues there is no photographer at all, or at least, not a human one. The books about the deer, the photo-booth, and the woman shooting are all the result of some machine based mechanism. In the case of the deer, the photos were triggered automatically by motion sensor. The photo-booth series is of course the product of a machine activated shot, and the shooting gallery images were automatic too, prompted by a bullet exiting the rifle’s chamber.

Which is your favourite?

The first one, about the anonymous Spanish woman. I waited a few years before publishing it. A lot of people were saying that I had to do something with the images, and after the book came out I was contacted by a gallery in Barcelona who wanted to show them. People made a poster of the anonymous woman and asked her to come to the gallery, a stunt that was picked up and covered in many newspapers and other places. A couple of weeks later, an older woman visited the gallery and said she knew the woman. It turned out that they worked together in a telephone company, and for the first time we had a name: Josefina Iglesias. She’d died years ago, but still that completed the circle, suddenly she wasn’t so abstract but an actual concrete person.

With most of the books, I try to find a link, a way to trace the story back to its protagonists, to find the people we spend so much time looking at. That’s why the back of every book contains a message that if these photos belong to you, they will be returned.

Threads this month is on archiving. Do you regard yourself as an archivist?

To be honest, I’m not that interested in being an archivist. I’m more into telling stories about other people. Sometimes you need an archive for that so you can make links and make new stories, but an archive in itself is dead.

One of the themes of the series is the tension between amateurism and professionalism. Do you regard yourself as an amateur?

I wish I could regard myself as an amateur but I’m a professional. You can learn a lot from amateurs and the way they look at things. The have a clean slate, and they don’t have the same neurosis about mistakes found in professional work. Professionalism just says MAKE NO MISTAKES in big capitals, but maybe there is something interesting in mistakes because they’re the reason people often look at a piece- the error makes it jump out from a crowd of over-slick productions. With these publications, it’s more about showing regular people’s passion for images, and that means including and even celebrating the technical errors they make.

What does this series tell us about photography as a practice and as an art form?

In a way, it tells us that everyone is a photographer and that anybody can make a story.

Now, image-making is democratic, everyone can make photography, and with so many millions of people practicing the form, some very good talents will inevitably pop up.

Whether this is art or not doesn’t really matter to me personally, but for what it's worth the series of the woman shooting sparked an enormous debate recently centred on just this point. It was bought by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam a little while back, making it the first amateur series ever admitted to their collection. There’s a big discussion on the net right now about how the woman isn’t an artist so why should such a prestigious museum have taken her work.

Tell me about the future of the publishing house itself. How did you set it up, and what are your plans for the future, and how does KK Outlet fit in?

The books we publish are always produced by people in the office, never by outsiders, and it was with this intention that we set up our publishing arm. More overtly commercial work, like our Hans Brinker Budget Hotel book or our collected work, 2 kilo of KesselsKramer, would never be published by us because they aren’t personal fascinations. The plan is that as the publishing arm grows, maybe it will change, maybe involving others outside KK. KK Outlet is born out of the same thinking: to have as much diversity as possible within our output. We were producing enough work to fill a showroom, so we thought why not make a space to fulfil just such a purpose. The Outlet is the result, a combined gallery, shop and workspace.



Erik Kessels

www.kesselskramerpublishing.com
www.kkoutlet.com

Face Addict piece for Dazed and Confused

A chat with one of the greats of modern photography, Edo Bertoglio, for DazedDigital in September 2008:

When Edo Bertoglio came to New York in 1976, he was a young film student looking for a ring flash for his Leica and a good time. When he left in 1990, he was a celebrated artist and staff photographer on Interview Magazine, having been part of the downtown scene – the hedonistic circle of freaks, artists, musicians, writers and whatevers vaguely orbiting around Andy Warhol’s Factory. He’d also become a heroin addict, pawning everything bar his two chests of negatives – pictures of friends and lovers, many of whom never survived the AIDs and OD epidemic that swept through the scene. After fifteen years in Italy, he decided to make the trip back to the rotten apple to connect the pictures in his archive to the faces of those who survived. Face Addict, out this week, is the film he made on the trip: a remarkable document – part confessional memoir, part art history – of a remarkable time.

Dazed Digital: Tell us about the film.
Edo Bertoglio: Face Addict was shot over two or three trips to New York. I lived in New York for 14 years from 1976 to 1990, and I had the privilege to work for Andy Warhol’s Interview, in the beautiful time that was the “downtown scene”. Unfortunately by 1982, 1983, the community started to be wounded by heavy drug use and the AIDs, overdoses, so the lightening flash lasted for 4 years, the really good years from 78 to 82. With the film I wanted to see how my friends rebuilt their lives. We were all survivors, in a way.

DD: You came to New York in 1976 from Paris. What was it like, falling out into this crowd?
EB: It was a great time because there were so many artists living close together geographically, and the music was what tied us every evening together. There was no difference between playtime and work – it was nice, “serious fun”, because we were having so much fun doing our thing with movies, pictures, painting, writing, music. There was a lot of creativity, but as a community not as individuals

DD: It most of been very exciting for you, as a photographer.
EB: I’d meet people and say, 'Can you come to my studio in the morning the way that you are dressed now?' This was long before stylists and so on: it was just the way that you saw the world and showing that to other people on the scene. Young people had come out of the early seventies, and people were not caring about clothes: not hippies, but jeans and all that. But in that scene, there was a real effort to look special.

DD: Today, the downtown scene is held up as this creative Mecca: were you conscious that what you were doing was going to have such a lasting impact?
EB: When we shot 'Downtown ‘81', the original guy was not reliable, so the director was like, Why don’t we take this young kid called Jean-Michael Basquiat? He was a star in that little, little corner of New York but we didn’t have this idea that he was this big star of the world. We were living so much for the moment, for the day – we were so busy underlining the importance for us, but not as a thing we could read the signs of in the future.

DD: When did this change?
EB: The DIY scene got bigger and bigger and got fashionable, but that’s where it started to go wrong, because the core of the downtown scene dropped off, because of AIDs or drugs, or just because everything going so fast all of the people there at the beginning little by little fell at the waysides. No… heavy drug use in '82 was what destroyed the whole thing. Suddenly a lot of people got big problems. For really a little while, for the space of a morning, drugs helped the creativity, made us even more prodigious, more dynamic, and because were sharing and we were discussing; we really thought that we could go on like this and we could maintain this habit; but when it became a habit, it was not so important to paint that painting: what was important was to go out and get drugs. For such an experience there is a very high price to pay, you know and we did pay a high price. I was the lucky ones, but many, many of us are not here now. That’s why I call Face Addict a survivor’s film.

High Places for Dazed and Confused

A lovely interview I from months ago on Dazed's ticket. Really, really cool band, and a really sweet couple:

High Places are really sick of fighting. "Everything extreme you can think of has already been done. Like if you want to see someone fucking vomit on the floor and beat their fists, you can, but it's done man," says Robert Barber. Rob plays nearly all of the instruments live in High Places, and Mary Pearson sings over the top, though that division doesn't stick in the studio. They're a really nice art-folk duo who live in flat in Brooklyn with their cats and sound like every song you've ever heard played backwards all at once.
They've played warehouses and split singles with Xiu Xiu and blown up The Smell with No Age. (Rob: "Everyone expects linked bands to be like mini-versions: people can't believe we're friends. But we love playing to new ears."). Pearson's a Michiganer who studied classical music and does projects about minimalism and immediacy and plays the bassoon. Barber grew up taking the Saturday train to New York to go skateboarding and studied printmaking at art school and designs some of their awesome covers with Pearson, like the red and yellow 03/07-09/07, which is a collection of EP and comp tracks.
Sitting over lemonades in Café Oto before the first date of their first European tour earlier this month, Pearson agrees that aggression is played out. "We get called childlike sometimes, but whatever. If that means we're honest, wide-eyed, then that's cool. When you see someone freaking out, it's like 'Yeah, that's interesting...'"
Barber and Pearson met through mutual friends (one of the Death Set, actually) in 2006 or so, and wanted to get together immediately. "We met while we were in the middle of our solo projects, and we just decided to work together," says Barber. Adds Pearson: "It was nice to do something not thinking too much – I find it really refreshing to collaborate and not have to think about, you know, classical form. I never annotate our music, but sometimes I'm still like 'You can't just change time signatures like that!' And Rob's like 'It's fiiine! It sounds good to me.'"
"We make tracks kinda like a collage, actually," says Barber. "We just make these small bits of a sound, sample them and piece them together later into songs." Pearson laughs: "The first song we did was just like messing about on a computer – emailing sounds to each through the walls. The other day I was just making this really horrible noise through a recorder, and we're going to loop that. I was reading Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience, it's all about how there can scientifically be a God – this book about man's place in the universe. I got so obsessed with it last summer! But you have to stop drawing your place in the universe all day. It's good to have mundane tasks to stop your head exploding."

Arthur Russell doc piece for Dazed

A news piece in Dazed and Confused’s October 2007 issue

“Another Thought: The Arthur Russell Revival Peaks With New Documentary”

Arthur Russell has always cried out for a biography. An obscenely gifted classical cellist, singer and disco producer, he was a student of north Indian music in Buddhist communes who moved East to NY when disco was bubbling under and collaborated with everyone from Phillip Glass to Larry Levan In eighties New York, he perfected his mix of outsider pop and spectral, mutant disco until his tragic, AIDs related death in 1992. While Soul Jazz and Rough Trade’s superb compilations, and Jens Lekman’s recent EP of Russell covers have brought him out of the cold, much of the man behind the music remains obscured by myth. A new film is set to change all that with a documentary about his life and times. “I wanted to take a fairly experimental approach to Arthur’s music. What I ended up doing is closer to a documentary with a full story told by Arthur’s friends and family, one that’s saturated with lots of visual material and archival clips,” says director Matt Wolf. “Arthur’s story is about more than just his experience as an individual—it’s about a particularly fertile period in downtown New York’s cultural history, it’s about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it’s about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—but I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch.”

www.arthurrussellmovie.com/
The film will be released in early 2008.

[ends]

Dan Hillier for Dazed and Confused

An art piece for Dazed from way back in February 2007, about a Max Ernst-biting modern engraver. Last I heard he was on Neil Gaiman's thing, which is great news:

If there is a movement in art toward the dark, weird and down-right odd in art at the moment (see those Chapman boys, Sebastian Gogel and any given grub street gallery) then Dan Hillier is definitely a part of it. Hillier creates intricate, dark, surreal, graceful and iconoclastic engravings, sourced from ephemera such as Victorian medical encyclopaedias, religious imagery and found photographs. “I like using found pictures and drawing out new narratives from them by bringing previously unrelated images together. I particularly enjoy the results when they're dark and a bit weird,” he says. The results are like postcards by Beardsley from a Victorian inventor’s mansion. If the mansion was populated by circus freaks and Werner Herzog, that is. No surprise that he lists his influences as wine, Max Ernst and mushrooms, then.
He grew up in between the dreamy towers and rough-as-guts estates of Oxford, and studied art Cambridge fifteen years ago. Whilst working as a henna tattooist, he was drawn to doctoring images in his work and, as a hobby, collected fragments of Victoriana. Recently, he started combining the two and realised that new, twisted stories could be told from the most banal of materials. After sifting through car-boot sales and back-street charity chops, fitting images were found. Quite simply, he trawls though “old anatomy and science books, vintage wallpaper, old advertisements for ludicrous Victorian quackery and labour-saving devices” so we don’t have to. The images, once found are combined and doctored on Photoshop or illustrated with vintage Indian dipping ink.
The works depends on the use of forgotten images and discarded memories to re-write a gorgeously dark period of our history, full of elephant men and taxidermy, death and medicine. There’s rich vein to be tapped, and Hillier is only too happy to oblige. With a wink, he calls his work “the quiet dedications of a slightly idiotic man with a fledgling perception of the universe's mysterious charms and a joy in the pleasures of communicating a love of strangeness, darkness, nature, beauty and human people.” He pauses and laughs. “Or just lines of ink on paper and wood.”

Richard Milward interview for Dazed and Confused

I wrote a piece for Dazed about a pretty and moving book about love on council estates in December 2006:

Concerned with two adolescents on a sink estate in Middlesbrough, Richard Milward's Apples tells the story of Adam, a shy Beatles obsessive with OCD who is desperately in love with Eve, the pill-crunching, Bacardi Breezer-guzzling school beauty. Where this gem of a book distinguishes itself is in the charm, freshness and sheer humanity that the author brings to the characters. "I wanted the Middlesbrough in Apples to be colourful and manic and beautiful," Richard says. "It's got a terrible reputation really (you know, heroin, pollution, deprivation), but it's actually a very fun place to be."
Despite the miles of column inches spent discussing "the chav", actual, humane reports on what life is like growing up on an estate in Anthony Blair's Britain have been ridiculously thin on the ground. Apples, then, is a revelation. The "anti-Macho fairy tale," as Richard describes it, is told by a mixture of the two heroes – and they are that – but also a cast of drug dealers, date rapists, graffiti writers, butterflies, drug dealers, lampposts and unborn babies.
Apples will probably be described as Kes in day-glo or A Catcher in The Rye for Smiths fans, but this short, unassuming and charming first novel, half of which was written by Richard during art college and half while on the dole, stands in a class of its own. "In a way, I had a sort of double life mirroring Adam and Eve's," he says, "except I don't have to shut things all the time, and I've never been caught wanking in my attic."