Photography Lecture Series California College of Arts Erik Kessels Sophie Calle

*USEFUL PHOTOGRAPHY #001*, edited by Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van der Meer

Erik Kessels (1966) is a founding partner and creative director of communications agency KesselsKramer. The company supports finding new ways for brands to tell stories using whatever media is most relevant to their message. He also helped set up KK Outlet, a combined exhibition space, gallery, and communications agency in London.

Kessels is a photography collector and has designed, edited, and published several books of vernacular photography through KesselsKramer Publishing, including the in almost every picture series, The Instant Men, and Wonder. Since 2000 he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography. Kessels has curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles. He was one of four curators (with Lou Reed, Fred Ritchin, and Vince Aletti) of the New York Photo Festival 2010, where he presented the exhibition Use me Abuse me.

KesselsKramer is working for national and international clients such as Diesel, Absolut Vodka, J&B Whisky, Vitra, Ben and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, for which it recently finished the book The Worst Hotel in the World

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has redefined through personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject/object, the public versus the private, and role playing. In her conceptual projects, Calle immerses herself in examinations of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity.

In the process of secretly investigating, reconstructing or documenting strangers' lives, Calle manipulates situations and individuals and often adopts guises. Thus in the act of pursuing a stranger to Venice, or taking the position of a hotel chamber maid to surreptitiously observe the guests, Calle conditions and recasts her own identity for that period of time. The documents or so-called evidence that results from these conceptual projects are presented as photographs, photo-text installations, and bookworks.

Calle's works often focus on the nature of desire and on the relationships between the artist/observer and the objects of her investigations, as in her sole video project Double-Blind. Produced in collaboration with Gregory Shepard, this conceptual road movie was released theatrically in Europe as a feature film, entitled No Sex Last Night.

Sophie Calle was born in 1953 in Paris. Her work has been shown at the 1990 Sydney Biennial and the 1993 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and has been included in exhibitions at the Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; Musée d'Art Moderne de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; De Appel, Amsterdam; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; The Clocktower and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hayward Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She was the subject of an issue of Parkett magazine (Issue #36) in 1993.

Calle lives in Paris.