Erik Kessels

Nowadays, family albums are very rare. Today you seem to find family photos online, on things such as Facebook and Flickr, instead of everyone keeping an album in their home. I feel this is a shame in some respects, there's something aesthetically pleasing about having a physical family album, with all its wear and tears. The images seem to hold more memories too, as they're once in a lifetime images, snapshots of a certain time in your life.   

Album Beauty, an exhibition of found photographs curated by Erik Kessels, is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once commonplace in every home, the photo-album has been replaced by the digital age where images are now jpegs and live online and in hard drives.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.

(Article and images available at: http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/erik-kessels)