Erik Kessels – författare

A fun and fabulous take on the art of making mistakes. Erik Kessels celebrates imperfection and failure and shows why they are an essential part of the creative process.Failed it! celebrates the power of mistakes and shows how they can enrich the creative process. This is part photobook and part guide to loosening up and making mistakes to take the fear out of failure and encourage experimentation.It showcases the best and most hilarious examples of imperfection and failure across a broad range of creative forms, including art, design, photography, architecture and product design, to inspire and encourage creatives to embrace and celebrate their mistakes.We live in an era when everyone is striving for perfection and we have become afraid of failure, which limits our potential. Mistakes help us find new ways of thinking and innovative solutions, and failures can change our perceptions and open up new ways of looking things. This book transforms mistakes from something to be embarrassed about into a cause for celebration.It includes over 150 visual examples drawn from Kessels personal collection of artworks and found photographs, along with tips, quotes, anecdotes and wisdom for celebrating with failure. To quote Kessels: 'the ubiquity of Apple + Z, means that we can literally undo any mistake before it has had time to breathe, be considered and — perhaps — evolve into something else: a fascinating, strange, provocative or even original piece of work. This book asks readers to embrace their fuck-ups, learn from them and celebrate their tawdry glory'.

Shining in Absence, the twelfth issue of the journal AMC2, addresses the disappearance of photography both as an idea and as a material object. Images of torn, vacant photo albums, empty frames and mounting corners fill this poignant volume, allowing viewers to consider the absence of such vestiges in their own lives.

The Many Lives of Erik Kessels presents the highly anticipated first illustrated survey of this pioneering and influential curator, editor, and artist whose varied experiments with photography and photographic archives have allowed us to reconsider the medium’s vernacular and narrative possibilities in today’s inundated image landscape. “People consume photographs,” says Kessels, “they don’t look at them anymore.” This volume is a primer on how to look—and how to better understand the hybrid practice of this artist who defies categorization. Including more than twenty of the artist’s series and features essays by Simon Baker, Hans Aarsman, and curator Francesco Zanot, The Many Lives of Erik Kessels is published in conjunction with a major mid- career retrospective at Camera: Italian Centre for Photography in Turin, Italy.

Muddy Dance is a book celebrating the movement of football. The players perform a seemingly choreographed dance on a muddy field, while twirling and tumbling for the ball. Or do they? This is the football book for art lovers and at the same time an art book for all football fans. In Muddy Dance Erik Kessels demonstrates another act of re-appropriating vernacular photography.

Distilled from over 15.000 family albums, Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch archives the human desire to put a hand on things. Whether it’s cars, boats, animals, trees, fridges, bridges, bushes, fellow humans or even their graves — everything that can be touched will be touched. Containing only 2.948 photos, this collection is far from ever being finished but provokes questions about the underlying motivations behind this universal pictorial behaviour. Do we seek connection? Do we claim ownership? Or do we just want to measure ourselves to the objects of our world? Perhaps you could ask yourself these questions, next time you strike a touching pose.

A man flanked by an equal number of women on either side when photographed - placed exactly where he seemsto prefer: right in the center. Is this manly act a matter of intent, instinct, or pure coincidence? And does thisphotographic composition belong to the past, or will it endure as long as one man and more women gather for aphotograph?