Mother Nature
Erik Kessels
RVB Books
English
Hardcover
140 pages
130 x 210 mm
2014
ISBN 9791090306264
As a way of continuing the work he started in Album Beauty, Erik Kessels brings us new artwork, based on his own collection of photographs. In Mother Nature, he assembles photographs of women posing in front of flowered spaces, which include flowerbeds in public and private gardens, fields and beyond. This universal theme, which he identified within his own photo collection, allows us to observe repetition and difference, which weave through yielding a common narrative. The book gives us the opportunity to move between places, times, generations and cultures. The individual stories and the foreign faces create a whole within which we see our common and immutable practices. In his book, Erik Kessels renders these private photographs visible anew, creating a visual anthropology of lived moments.
About the Artist
Erik Kessels was born in 1966; he lives and works in Amsterdam. He has presented numerous exhibitions at Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia (2015), Centquatre-Paris (2014), Les Rencontres d’Arles (2014), the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2013), Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco (2014–15) and the Images – Festival des Arts Visuels in Vevey (2014). He might not shoot pictures himself, but the Dutch art director and collector Erik Kessels has certainly changed the way we think about photography. As a curator of amateur photography, he’s elevated discarded images to gallery status, finding beauty and insight in pictures of, say, 20th century German police uniforms, or one woman’s lifelong love of fairground shooting galleries.
erikkessels.com
About the Publisher
RVB Books is both an independent publisher dedicated to designing and printing unique fine arts books and a gallery featuring exhibitions on new editorial practices.
rvb-books.com
