Conceived as the first retrospective in France focusing specifically on his publications, “As Far as You Can See” by Erik Kessels gathers close to 100 works and books, including Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch, which archives the human desire to put a hand on things, and MAN, both recently published by RVB BOOKS. Presented at La Fab., the show unfolds as a large visual and editorial journey through the images Kessels has patiently collected from flea markets, archives, auctions and online sources, and then re-edited, reassembled and recontextualised to reveal what ordinary photographs silently carry.
Rather than celebrating photographic authorship, Kessels’ practice consistently turns its attention toward anonymous images and amateur archives. Family albums, forgotten snapshots and casual gestures become the raw material of a work that focuses less on the photograph as an object than on the stories embedded within it. Across the exhibition, recurring book series such as In Almost Every Picture reveal patterns, repetitions and shared rituals that cross borders and eras, highlighting how similar visual behaviours appear in very different social and cultural contexts. By isolating these visual coincidences and narrative fragments, the exhibition foregrounds what these images say about everyday life, collective habits and the way societies unconsciously construct their own visual memory.
Originally presented in Milan at the Commerce bookshop and gallery, “As Far as You Can See” has been significantly expanded for its Paris presentation, offering a broader overview of Erik Kessels’ editorial, visual and curatorial research. Alongside books and photographic sequences, installations and artworks extend the questions raised by the publications, inviting visitors to reflect on how images circulate, how they are interpreted, and how they shape individual and collective representations. A dedicated bookshop space, La Librairie du Jour, accompanies the exhibition with a selection of Kessels’ publications featured in the show.
On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, Blind talked to Erik Kessels about his work.
You have published more than 100 books. How many are there exactly today, and when did this publishing practice begin?
There are 109 books altogether. I think the very first one dates from 1997, but the first book where I really started re-appropriating existing images was in 2001.
What triggered your interest in working with found photographs rather than taking your own pictures?
I am trained as a graphic designer and I worked as an art director. I had my own company, working in branding, design and advertising, and I collaborated with a lot of photographers. At a certain moment, when I wanted to make my own work, I asked myself whether I also needed to become a photographer. At the same time, I often went to flea markets and I started finding albums and photographs that people had abandoned. I became very interested in the way people photographed, and in the stories you could discover simply by looking at family albums. Sometimes you could find entire narratives in them. The first real project I made was about a Spanish woman. I found around 400 photographs of her at a market in Barcelona. Almost every picture was of this same woman, probably photographed by her husband. When I showed these images to people, they reacted very strongly. That is when I realised that I could do something with this material.
That project became the book In Almost Every Picture. Can you describe how that series started?
Yes. The first book in that series was made in 2001 and it is called In Almost Every Picture. It tells the story of a man who photographs his wife over a long period of time. When you look at the sequence, you can see that at the beginning he photographs her very closely. Over time, she becomes smaller and smaller in the frame. After about 12 years, she is almost disappearing from the image. You can sense that something is changing in their relationship, even though you do not know who these people are. I approach this almost in an anthropological way. It is about human behaviour and how photography reflects that behaviour over time. Today, there are 19 volumes in the In Almost Every Picture series. Each one focuses on a very specific photographic behaviour, always built around amateur photographs, sometimes of families, sometimes of animals, sometimes of very particular situations.
Another long-running project of yours is Useful Photography. How did that series come about?
The idea behind Useful Photography is already in the title. We live surrounded by images that are constantly used for practical purposes: manuals, brochures, instructions, catalogues. We consume them, but we never really look at them. When you isolate these images and remove them from their original context, they suddenly become beautiful objects. You start seeing them differently. I also ask myself why I should make new photographs when there are already so many images in the world that have not really been looked at yet. I am never the author of the photograph. I am the author of the work that is made with these photographs.
One of the books from that series, Muddy Dance, is often mentioned. What did you do in that project?
For Muddy Dance, I found photographs of football matches in England from the 1950s and 1960s. I liked them because the players look extremely dramatic, almost as if they are dancing. What I did is very simple: I removed the ball from every image. By taking away the ball, the whole context changes. Your eye becomes disoriented and suddenly it looks like people performing a dance.
Where do all these images come from? How do you find them?
I have a storage space near Amsterdam where I have accumulated about 15,000 family albums. I buy them at flea markets all over the world—Paris, Berlin, Brussels, but also in Japan, Singapore or the United States. I am not a collector in the traditional sense. I simply accumulate material. I do not archive it and I do not categorise it. When I have an idea, I go through the albums and I start scanning images.
What have you learned about human behaviour through all these projects?
I learned that reality is often much stranger than fiction. When you look at one single photograph, it may not seem very special. But when you start accumulating images and organising them, patterns appear. For example, I once found an album of a couple, Carlo and Luciana. They photographed each other constantly in the same place. Then, when they got married and started working, they stopped travelling and stopped taking pictures for 40 years. There are no photographs at all during that period. Only when they retired did they start photographing again. When you see this as a sequence, it almost looks like a fictional narrative or a work of art.
One of your projects focuses on unusual image categories, such as male body parts taken for dating platforms. Why were you interested in that material?
We found about 8,000 images taken from gay dating websites. Men photographing their own penis. With a team, we collected and organised them. In the book, we edited them as if they represented one single day in the life of one person. You see someone waking up, showering, shaving, having breakfast, measuring himself. The images actually come from all over the world, but when you edit them together, they form a very coherent narrative. It took a huge amount of time and labour to do that. It is not an easy job.
Do you also work with commercial or advertising images?
Sometimes, mainly for Useful Photography. I occasionally collect images from advertising or public communication, but most of my work is based on amateur photographs.
At what point did you stop working in your design company to focus entirely on your artistic practice?
My company, KesselsKramer, is still running and employs about 40 people. I stopped working there around five years ago. Now I mainly make exhibitions, books, talks and workshops.
You also publish books that are not directly based on found photographs. Could you talk about that part of your work?
Yes, I also write books. One of them was published by Phaidon and has been translated into 25 languages. It sold more than 250,000 copies. Some of these books deal with failure or amateurism. I believe professionals should also embrace amateurism.
Your exhibitions sometimes include sound and vinyl projects. How does that relate to your photographic work?
I use the same approach. I collect sound material instead of images. For example, I once recorded a friend who was snoring in a hotel room. I recorded twenty minutes, then turned him over and recorded another twenty minutes. That became a vinyl record, side A and side B. I also collect vinyl records that show large groups of people on their covers. I bought around 2,000 of them. I play fragments of all those records together. It becomes a chaotic mass of sound. During Covid, I made a vinyl mixing found recordings of birds and airplanes. We were missing the sound of airplanes, but we could hear birds again.
Which of your books have sold the most?
One of the most successful books is a book made with photographs found on German eBay, showing Nazi soldiers going to the toilet during the Second World War. It was reprinted three times. Another very successful one is the book based on the male selfies I mentioned earlier, although it is almost impossible to find reviews of it online because the images are censored by platforms.
Is there a book you feel particularly attached to?
The two main series—In Almost Every Picture and Useful Photography—are very important to me. It is meaningful to continue them over time. But one of my favourite projects is a book about the empty chair. I wanted to prove that almost every photograph contains an empty chair. It is, in a way, the chair of the photographer. The book is an object. It is expensive—200 euros—but when you buy the book, you also receive a real empty chair. It becomes a domestic object, something emotional, for someone who is not there anymore.
You mentioned that many projects remain unfinished. How important is failure in your practice?
On my computer, I have many PDFs and dummy books that were never finished. There are probably as many unfinished projects as finished ones. Some projects are not failures, but they are not achieved. I would love to publish some of them, but they were not ready. This work spans almost thirty years. You cannot publish everything.
Have you ever encountered legal issues concerning image rights?
No. I never pretend to be the author of the photographs. But when I re-appropriate an image, edit it and place it in a new context, it becomes my work. In In Almost Every Picture, I am very careful. I do not know the owners of most of the images. But I believe that, if they were still alive, they would have appreciated seeing their photographs transformed into a book.
Have you ever met people who appeared in the photographs you used?
Yes. There is this book, entitled In Almost Every Picture #7, about a woman who took self-portraits every year at a fairground shooting booth. I found out who she was and went to meet her in the Netherlands. She was 94 when I met her. Later she became 101. We travelled together for exhibitions. She became part of the project. She never owned a camera. She only made photographs of herself with a shooting gun at fun fairs. Very early selfies, in a way. There are about 70 images in total.
You often speak about ethics in your work. How do you define that responsibility?
For me, it is very important not to exploit images. I may use photographs without permission, but they are always treated with respect. I want people to see something that already exists and look at it differently. Today we consume images extremely fast, but we hardly ever pause. I like to create that pause.
Your own personal history seems to be connected to your interest in found images. Could you tell that story?
When I was eleven, my sister died. She was nine. The last photograph of her was taken by an anonymous photographer in a holiday park. My parents later cropped the image, turned it into black and white and printed it again. It became an important photograph in our living room, even though it was technically not a good picture. This experience shaped my relationship to photographs. A snapshot, even badly composed or slightly out of focus, can become extremely meaningful for some people.
What are you currently working on?
I am preparing an exhibition about carnival, using amateur material and popular culture. I am also working on an exhibition in Gibellina, in Sicily. There is also a new In Almost Every Picture book in preparation, this time with a white dog. Another project focuses on pairs of photographs. People rarely take only one picture. They usually take two, with a small time gap in between. The book is about that tiny moment between the two shots.
Where do you find the motivation to work on the next book?
For me, it is essential to always create a new narrative. I am not attached specifically to vintage photographs or family albums. I could work with objects or other material as well. What interests me is building a story, or revealing a story that already exists. There is also an anthropological and social dimension in my work. Human behaviour, and how photography reflects that behaviour, is what really motivates me.
“As Far as You Can See”, by Erik Kessels, is presented until March 15, 2026 at Galerie du Jour – agnès b., in Paris.
