Erik Kessels

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'.

Failed It! Full Counterpack

Cómo convertir errores épicos en éxitos creativos

¡Que Desastre!

Che sbaglio! Come trasformare i fallimenti in successi mandando tutto all'aria. Ediz. illustrata

Maak van falen je handelsmerk

Meesterlijke missers

Ale wtopa! Jak zamieniac bledy w idee oraz inne porady z zakresu owocnego ponoszenia porazek

Fashion design is not a category usually associated with war, but in fact it is a consideration that all war-mongers must take into account when they are planning battles, be they naval or air, military or rebel, national or international. Every country in the world has its own camouflage--can you tell from the various patterns which country is trying to hide from you? "Useful Photography No. 4: The War Special" exhibits what different countries wear when they go to war and the products that keep them hidden on the front lines.

The War Special

Useful Photography

Unfinished Father

Christian Bunyan

Album Beauty

Paul Kooiker

Terribly Awesome Photobooks

The zoological museum in Riga has a beautiful collection of animals, fossils and taxi-derma. Visitors get a clear and compact overview of what life in nature has to offer. From skeletons of large animals, a large collection of birds and shells, to the smallest insects, you can find them all in this compact museum. We as humans look at these displayed species full of curiosity and wonder. We are always surprised what kind of weird and wonderful surprises nature bring us. But aren?t humans filled with the same kind of strange and curious behavior? Aren?t we also some kind of ?strange animals??0Erik Kessels made an intervention in the zoological museum with a series of his collected, found and re-appropriated images called ?human zoo?. Images proving that we as humans don?t behave us any less weird and strange than the animals the images are paired with. These images infiltrate the zoological displays in curious ways, popping up, blending in, mimicking, and turning our focus to the human viewers of these exhibits. On display are humans? strange homing instincts and mating habits, the ways we both preen, growl and spray. Many of these images show the odd connections that humans and animals share together. The collected images of Erik Kessels react in a thoughtful and playful way to the animals in the museum, putting the weirdness of human and nonhuman species on display. It gives ?Human Animals? a taste of their own medicine, putting prime examples of the human species on display as artefacts behind the glass with the other animals, where we belong.00Exhibition: 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia (02.06.-28.10.2018).

Human Zoo

"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.

Shining in Absence

Amc2 Journal Issue 12

Erik Kessels’ multivolume In Almost Every Picturehas long been a coveted and revered classic of vernacular photography. In Erik Kessels: Image Tsunamithe Dutch art director has turned his attention to the abundance of images available for finding on the Internet, shared in their millions on websites like Flickr. In a world where everyone produces and edits photography, where, as Kessels says, “the average kid today gets photographed more than a celebrity of 50 years ago,” what does a single image mean, and what is its status in the overwhelming flood of images? In Kessels’ words: “Image Tsunamiholds an enormous collection of images that I live with, that I remix and edit. It’s a representation of the overload of imagery that is in my head. My hope is that the book will inspire others to make their own remixes of these images.”

Erik Kessels: Image Tsunami

In Almost Every Picture 13

Simon Baker

Francesco Zanot

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 midcareer retrospective at CAMERA-Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin, Italy.

The Many Lives of Erik Kessels

Matthias Harder

Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama (born 1938) first attracted international attention in the 1970s, with his gritty, black-and-white photographs of Shinjuku, a bustling area of Tokyo. Published for a spring 2012 exhibition at Galerie Alex Daniels-Reflex, Amsterdam, and with more than 230 large-scale images, "Journey for Something" offers an exciting overview of Moriyama's new work, as well as his classic images and some never-before-seen photographs that have been carefully selected by the artist for this volume. Many of Moriyama's photographs are shot with a light, hand-held camera, at times through a window or from across the street, often as if he were a tourist himself. Comprising a wide assortment of playful and almost surrealist images reproduced in large format, "Journey for Something" follows Moriyama from Tokyo to Osaka, from shimmering rows of nightclubs to shoes dangling from a telephone wire and a man running naked through the streets.

Journey for Something

Thomas Sauvin

A wordless, quarantined dialogue in flipbook form Every day, throughout that tumultuous spring of 2020, Dutch artist Erik Kessels (born 1966) and French artist Thomas Sauvin (born 1983) sent one another idiosyncratic, uncaptioned photographs, catalyzing an organic, free-associative exchange of some 120 archival images. Atelier Éditions' author Kingston Trinder then composed an equally free-associative, altogether-whimsical narrative with which to further entwine the duo's eclectic photographs. These two archives of vernacular photography, one from the East, the other from the West, achieve a dialogue through the recurrence of photographic practices, aesthetics and subjects. Talk Soon, a tearaway postcard book with a spiral binding, allows readers to endlessly juxtapose the delightful photographs selected by the two quarantined artists.

Erik Kessels

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