Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels (1966) is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with a particular interest in photography, and co-founder of KesselsKramer, an advertising agency in Amsterdam.

Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "Kessels made his name as a champion of found photography, seeking out discarded family albums in order to show us anew their mundane beauty and oddness.

He is best known for his magazine Useful Photography, which celebrates images of the purely functional, and his series of books In Almost Every Picture, which home in on motifs that appear accidentally in amateur photo albums – such as wayward fingers.

The idea in this series is to gather together a group of snapshots devoted to a theme and treat them as if the photographers were vernacular "conceptual" artists – which in a sense they are."

In 2015 Kessels was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, for Unfinished Father, along with Trevor Paglen, Laura El-Tantawy, and Tobias Zielony.

[4][15][16][17] Kessels' exhibition Destroy My Face, as part of the BredaPhoto 2020 festival in the Netherlands, was met with widespread criticism on social media of misogyny, and was eventually removed by the venue, Pier15 Skatepark.