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

Book art piece for Insight

Since early 2008, including the amazing Blood On Paper at the V&A, there's been a really pleasing growth in that whole book art thing. In June 2008 we decided to cover its impact in Brighton.

A new generation of book artists have been quietly redefining everything you know about the tied and bound for over a decade – and judging many a book by its cover. With an international event on our doorstep in July, Charlie Jones has a pressing engagement.
A new global generation of artists are basing work on the printed and bound – remaking novels, rescuing pulped fiction, printing on potato and fur and creating fine art from £5 paperbacks. For these artists, the printed page is a way of creating art itself, rather than a means of reproducing existing work. It’s a broad church, ranging from Dieter Roths early experiments stuffing crap lit into sausage skins, to David Shrigely’s horror-drawings to Denise Hawrysio’s bound Union Jacks to Sam Winston’s word remodeling. It’s subversive, quaint and literate art in the midst of a renaissance that recalls the installationist’s rise in the early seventies. Most exciting of all, many leading lights are coming to Brighton this month for a one-day symposium.
“Eight years ago, no-one had heard of book art, but now almost every art school will offer a course in it. It’s a very exciting time,” says Sarah Bodman, editor of Artists Books Yearbook, the definitive international journal on the form. Sarah, who was introduced to book art when she happened across a handwritten stream of consciousness inside a novel in her university library nearly twenty years ago, is speaking at the Books That Fly event this month at the University of Brighton, a conference and two-week summer school bringing together typographers, artists, academics and writers from around the world. This exhibition comes hot on the tails of last months Phoenix gallery collection, Press and Release, a show of independent and small scale publishing, including many Book Artists, and one of the country’s leading Book Art shop is on Bedford place – Permanent, a group who specialize in small run art books. Lee Shearman of the shop: “It’s been huge recently! It’s exploded, just in the last year. Every month we hear of more event, more artists, more places. I really don’t know what has created this, but that’s the way with inspiration, isn’t it? Someone does something amazing, that makes people go ‘wow, I could do that’ and so these scenes happen.”
Brighton is one of countless hubs worldwide. Sarah Bodman:“Is it a global movement? Very much so! There are practitioners based on every continent, with incredible regional variation. With the new possibilities of internet publishing, it’s easier than ever to get works made – twenty years ago it would cost £100 to make a book, but today you can make one for a fiver, meaning that the person on the street can take home an piece of art.”
permanentbookshop.com
bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Brighton bound – our list of local bookies

John Dilnot
Through his beautiful re-renderings of milk packaging designs, bad-apple guides and the like, John Dilnot’s work is both weightily political and playfully subtle, and that's all for the better.

Illustrator's Elbow
A newly formed group of 20-odd artists currently studying at the University of Brighton, working in drawing, printing, painting, photography and book-making.

Borbonesa Publishing
A collective of writers and artists who design and make conceptual occasional papers, currently working with filmmaker Jeff Keen to republish RAYDAY, a private broadsheet from the 1960s.

Henry Rollins interview for Insight

Hipster HC, whatever: interviewing your hero and him turning out to be an incredibly cool guy is one of the real joys of the game. Seriously people, if you haven't read Get In The Van, you totally should. Here's Hank making my week in July '08:

Henry Rollins is culture’s Kurtz, our Hemingway and your favourite uncle. A DIY punk with guts of steel, he’s also written one of the most moving memoirs about music (or anything) that I’ve ever read, Get In The Van, the exhilarating and gutwrenching story of his own private 1980s. He cut his teeth as lead singer of early eighties Californian punk crew Black Flag, the band that inked a thousand tattoos, sold a million six-packs and sent trillions of kids down the road to Do It Themselves. Aside from fronting the greatest hardcore punk band of all time, he’s also a renowned author, publisher, comedian, broadcaster and human rights advocate. The guy’s led what you could call an interesting life, and for one so famed for his no-guts-no-glory mindset, he came across articulate, sensitive and really, really fun. Basically, if there’s one person to spend an hour and a half listening to, it’s Hank. We called him up in Bangkok, and you really should go and see him this month.

Hi Henry!
Hi Charlie, how’s it going? I’m sorry this is late – I had an interview earlier and it overran, but thank you for ringing back and holding on. I admire your tenacity.

OK, no problem. Do you want me to call back later, or…
Let’s do this now: where I’m going this afternoon is ultra remote – no phones, no email, no electricity. So it has to be now. Let’s go for it now, and step on the other guy’s toes. Is that good with you?

Oh cool, yeah. So what are you doing out there anyway?
I’m going on a mission this afternoon that’s classified. I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the people with me, and I can’t tell a soul about where I’m going until afterwards. But believe me, you’ll hear in time!

Right! So tell me about the spoken word tour.
I’ve been on tour since September last year, and it’s a record of where I’ve been and what I’m doing and what I saw. Because of how it develops, the first 20 shows are never like the last 20 shows, because so much shit has happened in between. It’s been nearly a year, and I’ve done some pretty interesting stuff in that time, like going to Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan. Like when I was in Islamabad last year when Bhutto was assassinated, I saw a huge smoke cloud from my hotel, burning tires, and I was That’s where I’ve gotta be! That’s where it’s happening! Not in some vampiric, voyeuristic way, just in the sense that I want to learn the lessons. It’s one of the few ways that a man of 50 who is long of teeth and grey of hair can stick it to The Man! By going to Tehran, talking with prostitutes and waiters and bus drivers and then telling people You know what? Those “evildoers”, they’re really cool, and really normal as a matter of fact. How do you like them apples? And a lot of people don’t like those apples, believe it or not. You’d be amazed at how much shit telling people that other people are normal and cool gets you into, because The Man – whether he’s a some oil-hungry Neocon pussy or an Islamofascist asshole – doesn’t want you to know that.

What’s it like doing a show in Syria or Islamabad or Lebanon compared with a show in, say, Brighton?
Oh, I wasn’t doing a show; I was just visiting.

OK…
I always just drop in places I’m curious about, and see what up there. If I wanna know about somewhere I just go.

Do you think you’re a brave man?
Absolutely not, no way! I’m not a tough guy in any way whatsoever, man: if someone pulls a gun, I’m running away as fast as I can. I just want more from life than sitting around watching The Sopranos on DVD.

I heard you slept in Uday Hussein’s bed. What was that like?
It was a bed. Just like any other, but it was in the son of Saddam Hussein’s torture camp, with the hooks in the wall where he hung women up. When I was doing the USO stuff [Henry regularly visits troops in warzones and military hospitals], we were in the compound in Baghdad, and Uday’s palace was where some soldiers go for R+R – a place you can get air conditioning, a cold beer and a chance to watch Lethal Weapon or whatever on DVD and feel like you’re not in the middle of a war. So the guy was like on our first day in the Green Zone [adopts drill sergeant voice] One of you will now have the dubious honour of sleeping in the bed of Uday Hussein! And I was like Wow! What’s that going to be like? That’s MINE!

I though it was really cool how you once said that your way of protesting the war was visiting the troops.
I hate this war that Bush and his evil, evil gang of corrupt pondwellers have embarked on, but I have maximum respect for the troops who are fighting and living it every single day. So when USO [the organization that provides entertainment and support to US troops] said some of the guys out there like my stuff and they asked me if I wanted to meet some troops, I – of course – said yes. And it’s tough, man. These are guys who have seen and done more than anyone can imagine. I’ve talked to guys in hospital with pins stuck through their arm, amputees, people with their face blown off – things that no-one can ever imagine. The saddest thing is that these guys, their whole life has instantly changed. Whatever their plans were, however they thought their lives would pan out, those plans have to change, and so do the plans of his wife and his whole family. And there are no words for the rage that that gives you. Seeing that shit, it reminds you how much work is to be done.

What’s the toughest thing you’ve ever had to do?
What, you mean personally, in my life?

Yeah.
Grow up, I think. Having to realise that life is a lot tougher than you ever thought, and how hard you have to work at it. Realise that you have to use more than aggression in life, and that there are other people besides your whiny pissy little self. Yeah, that’s a tough lesson to learn, and it took a long time to penetrate my thick cranium, longer than most people. I had to have it kicked into me.

Are you an artist?
I’m not an artist, no. A bullshit artist, maybe… Musicians are allowed to have a long 18th year, if you know what I mean, a life with no responsibilities to speak of. But then you meet people who are like 21 with two kids, and that’s real, you know – having a human being that depends on you making money to stay alive. And you have to hustle hard then. A lot harder than strapping on a guitar and being like This is my office. You can't be surrounded by booze and drugs and girls and be like This is my nine-to-five and still connect on meaningful level to the guy driving the bus who is buying your record. Luckily, I make rent though, but I've gotta hustle. That’s why I do what I do, you know, the films and so on, the 300-day tours – I still have that minimum wage, how-am-I-gonna-make-rent mindset.

Why do people love Black Flag?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, I had nothing to do with the band – all the stuff that is remembered as classic Black Flag was written before I joined, mainly by Greg Ginn. I was like the fourth singer, so when someone says they love the band, I say, Yeah, me too, I’m a big fan.

Really? Because for me, you kind of are Black Flag: I can’t imagine the band without you. Even if you didn’t write the songs, you kind of do symbolize the band.
I was in the version that recorded the album Damaged and I was in the version that toured it internationally. So yeah, people around the world do think of them and me, which is cool, because they’re a really good band. But in terms of their appeal… Stuff like 'Six Pack', which is such a cool song, it’s absolutely awesome, was before my time. I had really nothing to do with that.

It’s about twenty past 10 here. What should I do with the rest of my day?
How much time do you have? If you get time, read some stuff on the internet. Get informed and inform others. And when the sun goes down, I’d think about getting laid and making dinner.

What should I do in August?
Oh man… Apart from see my show? You could go to North Africa. You’re like nine hours away from Marrakech, go and see what it’s like over there. Or book a flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and see the Killing Fields – it’s the rainy season over there, so all the bones and teeth will be exposed.

Cool! Cheers for this Henry.
No problem man. See you on the road sometime.

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."