Eric Kessels, Album Beauty:
Erika work features many formates of analogue photography. He created an unorthodox installation for his exhibition of different phonebooks, some being blown up to wallpaper and some still as the original format. These books all show different stories but keep the similarities of family, death and growth. Erik spent many weekends collecting vernacular photography at markets. Vernacular photography is the "creation of photographs taken by amateur or unknown photographers of everyday life and subjects". This relates to my work as I am photographing the experiences of my everyday life and I have the same common aspects of my suspects, for example my family and friends are repeatedly shown through my images.
By displaying the physical copies of the photo books, it shows the history of the images and how society presents memories of those around them particularly before technology became big and everything is stored on phones ect. I like the way specific pages like the ones above have been showcased, they are simplistic but also speak many words to the reader. I hope to create similar work to Erics, not to as much of a scale but I hope to showcase the finer details of his work within my final piece.
Pages as the one above, are similar to scrap booking, I don't want my final piece to be a scrapbook but more of a collage of old and new memories. I like the way the images themselves have been laid out as it's very impactful.
Above are some examples of Erics exhibition 'album beauty'. This exhibition was beautifully displayed and constructed, as the viewer experiences and walks round the exhibition they feel they are walking inside the personal stories as if they were part of the photo album themselves. It shows the rarity and preciousness of these images and how they capture such intense stories in one image, Eric wanted to showcase the importance of photo books and how much they are overlooked in present time.
