Talk: Erik Kessels – Storytelling with vernacular photography

Talk: 10.5.2019, 18:00
Free University of Bolzano, Piazza Università 1, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, room C003

Over a period of 20 years Erik Kessels has made many books and exhibitions out of his passion for vernacular and amateur photography. In this lecture he will highlight his latest publications and exhibitions such as The many Lives of Erik Kessels, Group Show, Photo Pleasure Palace and gives an insight in collecting and editing the photographs often found online or on flea markets from all over the world.
Another subject of the lecture is the role of images in the time we live in and how you can look at these in other ways than simply consuming them.

Who is Erik Kessels?

Called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Voque Italia, Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist known for his experimental use of found photography. He re-appropriates and re-contextualises images, creating new significance for materials that would otherwise be overlooked. Besides being the co-founder and creative partner of the international communications agency KesselsKramer, Kessels has published over 50 books of his ‘re-appropriated’ images, is editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography and has written the international bestseller Failed It!
Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Use me Abuse me, 24HRS of Photos, Album Beauty, From Here On and Unfinished Father. In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. In 2017-2019 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Budapest and Düsseldorf.