CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, in agreement with its main partners Intesa Sanpaolo, Eni, Reda and Lavazza, has embarked on a new course since the beginning of the year, relying on the direction of Walter Guadagnini.
The first assessment of the new course is traced by the President of the institution Emanuele Chieli who highlights "the enormous success of the exhibition dedicated to Magnum and Italy" and underlines that "with this extraordinary exhibition by Kessels CAMERA confirms its attention towards research more contemporary, of the most diverse languages through which photographic research is expressed” declaring himself certain that “the exhibition of one of the great protagonists of European photography will be a stimulating surprise for the public”.
In his twenty-year career, Kessels has established himself as a primary and indispensable reference in the field of so-called 'found photography'. Instead of shooting new images, for most of his projects he collects pre-existing photographs and reuses them as pieces within his own mosaic. He is a photographer without a camera or lens: photography in his practice is a ready-made that is taken and recontextualized.
The result is a sort of ecology of images, whereby nothing is added to the enormous quantity of representations that now crowd the world and grow exponentially every day, but on the contrary, only what is already available is recovered and recycled.
Exhibited within the entire space of ROOM, The Many Lives of Erik Kessels crosses the entire photographic career of the Dutch author through a complex path that includes hundreds of images. A total of twenty-seven series were presented, as well as numerous books and magazines published by the now famous Kessels' own publishing house (KesselsKramer Publishing) and by other publishers. In a non-linear and chronological journey, one finds monumental works, more intimate and private series, authentic icons of the entire universe of 'found photography' as well as recent and still unpublished productions.
Among the works on display, to name a few, 24hrs of Photos literally invades the exhibition space with a mountain formed by the prints of all the images, hundreds of thousands, uploaded on the Internet in just one day.
My Feet, a majestic installation composed exclusively of images of the photographer's feet, immediately introduces the concepts of repetition and archiving.
Valery, a woman who has had her picture taken immersed in water all her life, Oolong, the tightrope rabbit, and a dog too black to appear correctly in photographs, are just some of the protagonists of In Almost Every Picture, a cycle of 14 projects (until today) focus each time on an obsessively recurring subject.
My Sister is a music video by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto taken from a home movie entirely dedicated to a ping-pong match between the author and his sister, who tragically died in a car accident when she was only 9 years old.
Album Beauty is an entire room dedicated to the phenomenon of family albums, one of Kessels' favorite subjects, which democratically rehabilitates the amateur photographer by projecting him into the spotlight of artistic research.
The Many Lives of Erik Kessels thus constitutes in turn a great accumulation. First of all, of exhibition methods: between framed and framed images, hung on the wall and lying on the ground, light-boxes, cubes, wallpaper, portrait frames and projections, it constitutes at the same time a synthesis and a de-construction of every possible photographic exhibition. And of photographs, of course: there are no genres, authors, eras, geographies excluded from Kessels' omnivorous investigation. Up to waste: instead of being a shame to be carefully avoided, here the error becomes an attractive and significant element. It's what makes a photograph special. A sign of its vitality. Kessels rummages through the photographers' waste, returning it to the collective gaze from a completely renewed perspective. Here too comes the often ferocious and irreverent irony of his work. Rice has a liberating and purifying function. It allows Kessels to go deep, dropping all hypocrisy and expressing a deep affection both for the involuntary protagonists of his photographic pantheon and for photography itself.
Co-produced with NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, the exhibition is accompanied by a 576-page book published for the occasion by Aperture, New York, with texts by Hans Aarsman, Simon Baker, Erik Kessels, Sandra S. Phillips and Francesco Zanot .
Ph. Erik Kessels From in almost every picture #2
