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on 22nd March 2013 by Holly Booth
There will be two events in conjunction with the exhibition Album Beauty by Erik Kessels, currently on display in QUAD Gallery.
An ode to the vanishing era of the photo album, Album Beauty is an exhibition of found photographs curated by Erik Kessels which is part of the FORMAT International Photography Festival.
There will be chance to take part a free exhibition tour of Album Beauty in the Gallery with QUAD Curator Peter Bonnell on Saturday 30th March at 5:50pm. The informal tour is open to anyone and places need to be booked through QUAD Box office.
Following this there is also a chance to see a film screening of ‘Kessels Eye’ by Simone de Vries, showing the Dutch Artists Erik Kessels at work as he gives new perspectives to everyday images. Kessels combines many disciplines in his work, finding inspiration everywhere. Working as a graphic designer, curator and passionate collector of photography, he edits, combines and pulls stories to the surface that are, for others, hidden. How do you decide what is important in the endless stream of images that come at us every day? For Kessels it is very important to keep looking and questioning what you see. "Looking at an image is something different than consuming an image," says Kessels. "People let images glide along, they look no longer." ‘Kessels Eye’ (De Kijk Van Kessels) screens in QUAD Cinema on 30th March at 6:30pm. Tickets are £5 and need to be booked through QUAD Box office. The screening will be preceded by an introduction by QUAD Curator Peter Bonnell.
Once commonplace in every home, the photo-album has been replaced by the digital age where images are now jpegs and live online and in hard drives. These visual narratives are testament to the once universal appeal to document and display the mundane. Often a repository for family history, they usually represent a manufactured family as edited for display. The albums speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship.
Erik Kessels is a collector of vernacular photography and has spent many Saturdays at outdoor markets and junk stores collecting ‘anonymous’ photo albums. Kessels has published several books on vernacular photography and is also an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography. Kessels has curated many exhibitions, including the New York Photo Festival in 2010, and ‘From Here On At’, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles in 2011. Kessels is co-founder and creative director of KesselsKramer, an independent international communications agency located in Amsterdam and London.
Erik Kessels: Album Beauty is on display in QUAD Gallery until Sunday 26th May 2013, as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival. Album Beauty is curated by Erik Kessels in collaboration with Foam Amsterdam.
FORMAT International Photography Festival will take place in Derby UK between 8th March and 7th April 2013. The biennale festival celebrates the wealth of contemporary practice in international photography and is now one of the UK’s leading non-profit international contemporary festivals of photography and related media and the theme for this year’s festival is ‘FACTORY’. FORMAT13 promises to be the biggest and most ambitious yet, it will be not only a celebration of Derby, the birth place of mass production, but will also explore how the factory continues to be relevant in the 21st century digital age through a programme of exhibitions, events, workshops, mass participation and much more.
Founded in 2004, FORMAT International Photography Festival presents the best of emerging international talent, showcasing it alongside the masters of photography and has established itself as a world class biennale and must-see event in the photographic calendar. FORMAT is directed by Louise Clements, organised and hosted by QUAD and the University of Derby.
For more information on FORMAT International Photography Festival, please see the website http://formatfestival.com