I’ll be honest and say I only came aware of Eric Kessels when he created the house of flickr images, but it’s only so often that D&Ad put a talk on in Manchester. Myself and Mike Kirkpatrick (3rd yr Preston student, working at Detail at the time) got ourselves a couple of tickets and headed over. After a couple of pints we headed in.

He gave a brief introduction to how he started his career and his brief time in London (wearing chicken suits) before heading back to Amsterdam. Hans Brinker Budget Accommodation was his first client, and after breaking it to us that the hostels was in fact a shit hole, he used this humours and witty campaign to demonstrate to the travellers exactly what they would be getting. This Campaign was so successful it is still the back bone of the hostels advertising today.

Moving on he began talking about his own publications which made me realise just why I love car boot sales so much. Many of the publications are collections of photography found at car boot sales. From rabbits with things on their heads to fairground galleries, Kessels manages to spot the creativity and slightly humorous side to almost any photography catalogues he find. People may be away of Maddie the Coonhound, a tumblr feed about a dog standing on things. In many respect this is very similar to the story of Oolong (in almost ever picture #8), however the interesting thing I find about Oolong (Kessels) is that it was created early before Tumblr & WordPress, even though I think the photography is just as funny.

He carried on discussing the other photo albums he found, another was about a family continuously trying to photographer there black dog. As the photos were all taken on a film camera, the family had a go a taking each photo once so the exposure would play a very important part. There seemed to be hundreds of shots were the dog was completely blacked out until the finale were they just managed to get it right (the photo received a round of applause from the audience.

And last but clearly not least was another book which involved a dutch woman who went to a fairground every year to shoot at a target and she documented each year with the photographs taken as she took her shot by the store owner. The documents photographs start back in 1936 when the woman was only 16 and shows the development in technology from film to polaroid. The book ended up in a Modern Art Mesuem and rightly so.

A great talk to all who attended and what an inspiration. If you want to (try) and see some of Kesselkramer‘s hop over to their site and keep hitting refresh… it doesn’t get old.

Kessels also put on a competition for students to to which Stuart Mitchell came second place in for his nice idea, read up about here….