Bangkok Beauties
Erik Kessels
Kesselskramer
English
Softcover
Edition of 250
28 pages
17 x 230 mm
2007
ISBN Not available
Beauty captures the eye as well as the imagination. There is something naturally alluring and distracting about loveliness; something in its purity, its naiveté, its promise and its hopeful inspiration. We all tend to gravitate with passion towards the ideal. In Bangkok Beauties, Erik Kessels provides a look at a specific photographic series that depicts attractive women during a beauty contest sometime ago. Here we see the contestants displaying themselves in such a way as to be judged by their poise, their posture and most of all by their appearance.
The photographs have become even more precious and lovely in their decay. Over the years, the pictures have deteriorated, been scratched and suffered weather all of which serves to enhance their beauty both as images and as objects. In fact, we can hold these rescued beauties and see them front and back thereby join in the admiring contest that continues even still.
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
KesselsKramer is a company which aspires to do things differently in the field of communications. KesselsKramer Publishing is an extension of this restless attitude. In images and words, it finds new ways of expressing creativity through printed matter.
kesselskramerpublishing.com
