Modern Anthropologist: Erik Kessels on the “Ecology” of Images and the Philosophy of Mistakes

Transmission 340: Interview with Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels is an artist, designer, curator, publisher, and creative whose work has fundamentally reshaped how people think about photography in the 21st century, and who has spent over three decades proving that perfection is overrated. He is known for his unconventional approach to images, not as a traditional photographer but as a collector and re-interpreter of found photography, elevating everyday snapshots and vernacular images into visual narratives that surprise, delight, and challenge viewers; and for his fascination with “fabulous failures,” vernacular photography, and the intersection of advertising and fine art. Since co-founding the independent communications agency KesselsKramer in 1996, Kessels has combined artistic risk-taking with creative strategy, producing award-winning campaigns and exploring the cultural life of images far beyond commercial contexts.

His publishing imprint, KesselsKramer Publishing, has released dozens of books that celebrate the unexpected beauty, humour, and poignancy found in amateur photographs, from the long-running In Almost Every Picture series to the international bestseller Failed It!, which reframes mistakes as essential creative catalysts. As editor of the alternative magazine Useful Photography and curator of landmark exhibitions such as 24hrs in Photos, Album Beauty, and Unfinished Father, Kessels mines archives, flea markets, and the depths of the internet to find unseen patterns and cultural insights in images often dismissed as banal. His practice, framed by critics as a form of “visual archaeology,” highlights authenticity and imperfection in a world dominated by polished digital imagery. He has earned numerous accolades, including the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts and a nomination for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has been described by Time Magazine as “a visual sorcerer” and by Vogue Italia as a “modern anthropologist,” underscoring his unique ability to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. His work, including the Europe Archive and the Portfolio Parade at the MIA Photo Fair, continues to expand how we display and engage with the infinite scroll of modern visual culture.

Official site | KesselsKramer | Instagram
Featured image: © Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels has spent 25 years buying strangers’ memories at flea markets, and what he found in them says more about human behavior than most art made on purpose.

Which early experiences, beyond photography, shaped your visual sensibility most deeply, and why?

I lost my sister when I was 11 years old. When I was 11, my sister was 9, and she died in a car accident. Somebody drove through the red light and hit her while she was crossing the street. My parents, in that period, were also looking for her last photograph. There was a photograph they found which had the whole family on it, and there was a picture taken in an amusement park by an anonymous photographer. When you leave the amusement park, you can take a print that they made of you. You can take the photograph. So that was, in a way, the last picture of my sister. My parents cropped it. They cropped the part of my sister out, they enlarged it, and they printed it and hung it in the living room.

That picture became, while it was a reproduction of an original print, and it was made black and white, and it was not a very good picture, it was out of focus and not a very good composition, but for me, the fact that the meaning of that picture changed, by my parents almost by intuition cropping it and enlarging it, because this was the last picture, made it also show the power of a very mundane image can be very big, because of the story that is behind it, and that you can change the meaning of the picture. So this is to me a very early memory, and I never, maybe I forgot it, maybe, but intuitionally that also brought me, I think, into the things that I now sometimes do also with the reappropriation of images.

You talked about the ‘back garden’ (the messy, creative space). What does your literal back garden look like? Is it curated chaos, or is it a secretly minimalist space?

For me, my back garden is quite a metaphor. When I talk about a back garden, a backyard, it’s like the place where all your hidden dreams, unfinished projects, fascinations, embarrassments, and all these things are. To me, in my case, it’s quite chaotic; very, very chaotic. It’s where there’s a lot of unfinished things, where there’s maybe forgotten things, maybe like pain or strange ideas, and all these things are there. But it’s a very good playground to go back into, because it’s a reservoir of things that are not finished yet; sometimes you combine things with each other and then there’s a new idea.

And then, when you have that idea… you know, my front yard is much more organized. There, I just like finishing things and I’m also much more in control; in the backyard, I’m much more out of control. So, that is the difference between these things. What I mean to say with it, also, is that people, and also creative people, should, especially nowadays where everything can be fixed so quickly with AI, with applications, with the computer, spend much more time in their own backyard, metaphorically. Because it’s a place that is much more real; it’s much more a real reflection of yourself in comparison with the front yard. The front yard is your portfolio, your website, you want to show yourself from the best side, and the backyard is more who you really are.

You’ve called yourself a “photographer without a camera.” How has this identity shaped your views on the role of creative control and originality in the digital age?

In combination with the story I first told you about my sister, in combination with the fact that I am also educated as a graphic designer, art director, and in my work and in the company KesselsKramer that I ran, I worked many times with photographers, and I tried to work with very interesting and autonomous photographers. For me, for instance, I would be very… I mean, I have a lot of cameras and I sometimes use them, but not for my work. I know that I could do that, but it’s not so interesting. For me, it’s much more interesting to look at the images that are already there; because there’s also my fascination for amateurs and for the people that do things really intuitionally and very positively naive, for me that’s very important.

So, that in combination, I find it much more interesting to reappropriate things, and to look at things and give them a second chance and a second life. Because, like, there are so many images around; why would you not use the ones that have not been talked about or that are not used yet? So, for me, the story and the narration and what people want to say with an image is very important. So, this can be a digital image, can be an image that is generated, can be a vintage old photograph, it doesn’t matter to me. I have no respect for the medium; I have respect for the message and the story that’s in a single photograph. How it’s taken is not so important for me, but why it’s taken is much more interesting.

You find and recontextualise photos. How do you understand and decide when an existing image has the potential to become something meaningful, rather than just being visually interesting?

I think that is also something that has to do with that has to do with being able to look in the sideline of a photograph or in the fringe. Or, for instance, like nowadays with AI, for instance (which is a tool that can be useful), but what you should not forget is that AI, in the end, is just like a statistical hallucination. It’s a statistical image which has been generated by many other images that are being put into data sets. And this is exactly what I find interesting: that people label these images, that is manually done, and they put the trees with the trees and the cars with the cars. But something that is happening in the side of the image, or in the background of the image, or emotionally in the image… that is something they don’t describe. And for me, it is more also something to investigate: what other kind of information there is in an image, apart from the general information that you see.

While most artists are obsessed with creating the new, Kessels is a master of the “already there.”

For instance, I did a book called The Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch, where people touch a car, touch a tree. In most of the cases, this image would be labeled as a ‘tree’, but never labeled as a ‘person touching a tree’. Or, for instance, I made a book and a project about the fact that there’s always an empty chair in other people’s pictures; and this is, like, obviously the chair of the photographer, because he or she steps out of the image and takes the photograph, and there’s one empty chair there.

But, for instance, this is the way of trying to look at things, because an image like this would never be noticed otherwise. So, I try to force people to look at images in a different way. And that is just an idea you should see or find, and it’s also some kind of a visual archaeology or visual anthropology; it’s like how you look at things and what kind of human behavior there is sometimes. I mean, one of the first books I did was about a woman from Barcelona. I found maybe 400 images of her in Barcelona on the market, and her husband photographed her over 12 years. In the beginning, there were very close-up pictures of this woman and, in the end, she was very far away in the image. So the photographer and the subject, his wife, just departed from each other, and there became more distance between them. So, if you go through the book, it’s almost like a flipbook, because you see this woman getting smaller and smaller in the images. So this is interesting to look at: like, why is this? Why do people do this? I mean, there’s an endless amount of information and discovery that you can still find in photographs.

When working with vernacular images not originally created for artistic display, how do you balance respect for the subjects’ privacy with your creative reinterpretation?

Of course, I mean, I never pretend that I am the author of the original images, but I’m the author of the work that I make with it and that I reappropriate. But, of course, when I find a series of images which I could seriously upset people with, I would never publish that. But, for instance, this Spanish woman we talked about: I found like 400 images on the market, but this is like a love tribute of the husband taking pictures of his wife for 12 years. And both of the people are dead, and I found that out. And I think, when they were still alive, that they would find it also an honor… like a tribute.

There is a certain ethical thing that you, of course… I always try to find who the people are, but if it’s on the market, often the people have died. But your own ethical considerations, especially nowadays when you see online how many private images there are circulating; and there’s sometimes very interesting subjects in there, but that is something I would not so easily touch, because you need to respect that.

And in other cases, like, for instance, when I do research on a certain topic with the empty chair, there’s a lot of people in these images, but I’m not talking about these images; I talk about the empty chair, or them touching something. It’s more like a collective idea of a work that I make with it. Again, as I said: I am not pretending to be the author. But by showing it to people, to read and look at the images in a new way, it’s almost like an ‘ecology of the everyday’. That you recycle these images to look at them differently.

In an era where billions of photos are uploaded daily, how do you think the meaning of a photograph has evolved?

The meaning of a photograph has dramatically changed, of course, because now a photograph has no value anymore. Of course, when you make a passport picture for your passport, or when you take a photograph, the first photo of your baby or things like that—this has maybe still a value. But other than that, the role of a photograph has changed; we just use a photograph to share things very quickly with others. It has a very short life cycle, an image. Which is not bad, I’m not saying that this is strange or bad, but it’s just dramatically different from, for instance, the time when people were still making family albums. They made like maybe seven or eight albums in a lifetime, and that was it. And you can imagine the amount of images there; it’s so much less than it is now. So, those images were also much more precious, and more people documented their life with maybe a hundred times, a thousand times less images.

But the meaning… it’s like nowadays it’s almost like opening and closing a door, or it’s like winking with your eye; it became so normal to do, to take a picture. I think nowadays it’s even more complicated to delete an image than to take a new one, because deleting is more complicated, you need more time for that. But even now, I find it sometimes interesting how people take photographs for certain useful things: like when you park in a parking lot, you take a picture of the number of parking spots; you take a picture of the label of a wine bottle; or, you know, the password of a wifi in a hotel, or things like that. That’s interesting. Even with the change of time, it’s quite nice to look at how people do, and how people use photography and what they do with it.

You work with physical prints found at flea markets, objects with a tactile history. Given our increasingly digital, cloud-based existence, do you think ‘digital trash’ (broken JPEGs, accidental screenshots) will ever possess the same soulful quality as a physical found photo?

First of all, it is not… I am not treasuring a vintage photograph, for me, it’s not important. I mean, like a screenshot, or a very old JPEG, or any file,  it is equally interesting; for me, it’s more important the story.

But I can imagine, I think that I go with the digital storm, or with also when you open and close a JPEG and you save it differently and you do that a hundred times, the JPEG is almost gone because it’s decaying also. And so I think it could be even that in 100 years’ time, the photographs people took in the 60s, 70s, and 80s or 90s with the camera, they are still the ones that are remaining, while a lot of digital waste is gone.

Could be. At least the digital files are much more fragile than a physical print.

Is there a specific photo or object you saw at a flea market in the past that you didn’t buy, and still think about today? 

It happens many times, but there’s one object that I really regret not buying. Because I also do a project called Europe Archive, you can find it on europearchive.eu, and it’s, in a way, an archive also of objects that are vernacular objects almost, that tell a story about a country. So, all European countries are represented in that archive and my friend and I, we probably buy objects on the market that tell something about the country; we don’t know what we are looking for, but when we see it and we find something beautiful, then this fits.

But there was, at a market, a metal suitcase. And if you open the suitcase, there were maybe 16 different door handles in the suitcase, and they were displayed with numbers. So, this was actually the suitcase of a salesman who went from door to door and rang the doorbell and then said: ‘Listen, I see that you have this door handle, but I have, like, much better ones.’ And then he or she opened the suitcase and there would be a display of 16 or 20 different door handles. For me, that is like a very poetic thing: that a salesman goes door to door to sell new door handles. And this was in a market in Brussels and, for some reason, we didn’t buy it because we didn’t want to carry it where we were going. But it was like… I am still thinking about that many times, because it’s a beautiful object and you will never find it anymore. Because it’s something you don’t find, it’s all gone.

You find magic in the mundane. As people’s attention spans decrease to 15-second clips, are we losing the ability to be bored enough to find the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’? How do you train yourself to keep looking when everyone else has scrolled past?

What I do is, I need to isolate myself. For instance, when I have an idea, I have a storage space close to Amsterdam and there are like 50,000 family albums in there that I have bought over 25 years. And then I start looking at things; I concentrate, I isolate myself so that I can focus on these things. And the work that I do has mostly also to do with that: I want people to pause at an image or to look at it again, to stop looking at many images and to start looking at a small story of images, or to look at things like they haven’t looked at before yet, or they haven’t seen before yet.

I also did a work called 24 Hours in Photos, where I showed many, many pictures; so this is like the opposite way, you show how many images we live with nowadays. But with the stories that I find and see sometimes, then I want people to be more calm and to look more at an image and not consume an image. Because we rapidly consume images; we don’t even look at them anymore. So, I’m trying to focus on this.

You’ve talked about ‘drowning’ in images (like in your 24HRS in Photos installation). If we are in an image-overload crisis, is ‘not taking’ a photo now a more radical artistic act than taking one? 

Yeah! By not taking an image, and looking at existing images. For instance, I also sometimes have photographs that I took myself. I have a series of photographs where my children have bloody noses, because I always took Polaroids when they were small, when they had bloody noses. But at that moment when I did it, I never thought about making this into a project; it was more something that I wanted to document, I wanted to keep hold on to that moment. Only much later, I saw maybe 80 of those photographs; so then, I reappropriated my own photographs. Because what I also very much like is that if there is intent, for instance, as a photographer who is an artist-photographer, there should be an intention, to have an idea. So you start making a series or project with an idea. But, for me, that would already spoil it, because I like to find ideas that are already made, or a fast story that is already made, because the authenticity is much stronger.

It’s much more authentic; it was made not for that reason. And so there is a certain naive quality, in a positive way, to the story, and this is important for me, because it’s almost the unintentional aspect of something that is very important. Because if you made a work, you have a certain intention to do this; but I find things that were made unintentionally, often.

If you could design a curriculum for young creatives based solely on errors, what lessons would you insist they learn first? What type of failure can actually lead to an unexpected breakthrough?

One thing that could help a lot, also when you start, and that could maybe be seen as an error, is that it is very important to say ‘no’. Because this might be seen as something bad, or as an error, or something that is strange to say; because when you start your career, you have to make sure that you have the right career, and saying ‘no’ is, maybe… This is really a good thing to do. Because you have to also shape your own personality by where you say ‘yes’ and where you say ‘no’, and this is important.

And it’s almost something contrary to nature, but it is important; because to say ‘no’ to a job sometimes, or to something that is being offered to you, sometimes says more about who you are than when you say ‘yes’. Like, that is something, I think that’s the best advice I could give, because it’s also, for me, that’s still something very important. Like, when do I say ‘yes’, or when do I say ‘no’. And it’s very complicated, also. It’s very hard to do, to say ‘no’. But when you do this, you feel much better after, because you have made a clear decision.

In Unfinished Father, you use the skeletal remains of a car restoration to mirror a biological breakdown. Photography usually ‘freezes’ a moment, yet this project resists healing. At what point did you realize that the act of displaying these fragments in a gallery would offer a form of completion that the physical object, and perhaps the situation itself, could never achieve?

First of all, my father at that time was still in hospital when I got the opportunity to do this exhibition. So, in the end, I decided to combine both our passions in a way: in restoring this car and making installations and works with found photographs or photographs that are already taken. So, in this case, I found many pictures from my father’s archive, or that he had on CDs, on Polaroids, on small hard disks or USB sticks, and they were images about the progression of the restoration. But for me, the most important thing was when I started to make the idea for the installation. Of course, the idea was to have the car there, but I needed to show the photographs, also, in a certain way.

And I could have made it like a workshop in that big space that I was offered, but in the end I decided to put them on the floor, all the photographs. And that’s also why the meaning of it changed. Because apart from these very strange and normal pictures of car parts and restored car parts, when they are on the floor they become very fragile and visitors need to walk through them; they need to be careful not to touch anything. Much more fragile… photographs much more fragile on the floor than on the wall. And this was an old synagogue in Reggio Emilia, and when these two things came together, my idea with the car and this location, it worked really magically. Because then it also worked very well that this was almost like a portrait of an unfinished relationship with a father. But it had mostly to do with making and trying and seeing how you could install it and design the installation in the best way; and also taking risks in that and doing it, trying to do it differently. This, in the end, made it work much better.

You celebrated the novice, but in an age where everyone is a ‘professional novice’ using filters and framing rules, is there any truly naive photography left, or has technology turned people all into self-conscious art directors? Are we attending to the literal death of the ‘happy accident’? 

Now, even more, you make a photograph, you don’t take a photograph anymore. It’s more that everybody makes a photograph because they know how to make a photograph and what to do with it: how to behave in a photograph, how to make a composition. I think the most unintentional photograph is like the ‘pocket photograph’, you know? Like the camera that goes off in your pocket. And those are the abstract, almost Rothko-kind of images. And those are maybe the most… the ones that we have no control over and that are quite nice, because there is a big error in there and it’s very unintentional.

But yeah, it’s right. For instance, when the analog camera was there, people had a finger in front of the lens or the camera strap in front of the lens; but now, with the cameras on our phones, we of course see everything we do and we, it’s like trial and error, and we make a photograph until it’s perfect. But maybe the pocket, the unintentional pocket photograph… this is maybe the most abstract one, but also maybe the most uncontrolled one. And I never thought about it like that, but when you ask this question: it’s maybe the most authentic one.

In some of your work you find the abstract and humor in  the unconventional or imperfections. How important are these aspects in your selection? How do you navigate or balance humor with deeper emotional resonance?

For me, there is never a starting point. If you start to find something humorous or something funny or ironic, you will never find it. But I have an antenna for approaching things not always in a very serious way. So, if I find something, the idea is, for instance, that comes also in how you present it, how you talk about it. If you look for something very funny or humorous, you will not find it for sure; but this needs to be an intention of you to play with the things and to turn them upside down, to try to do different things with them.

Because, in the end, for instance, the very recent book I did is called Men. And I show in this book, which is a small but very thick book, I show what I want to prove: that men always want to be the center of attention and they want to be in the center of the photograph. So, there’s a woman on the left and a woman on the right, and the man is in the middle of all the photographs. But just because the book is so thick, when you open the book, the man disappears in the spine of the book. I mean, the pictures in this book are not humorous, you know? There’s a man in the middle. But what you do with it suddenly becomes very humorous, because when people open the book, the man is disappearing.

So this is like what you do with it and how you handle this; and now, I try to play with it and keep it open, and also not to say that something is humorous. But people have to find out for themselves, and then it becomes even more humorous.

Photos courtesy of Erik Kessels

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.