in almost every picture 6-erik kessels

in almost every picture.

1926

1928

1934

1935

1936

1939

1940

1941

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1952

1953

1955

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1977

1978

The impulse to mark our lives is universal. Start a diary, build a house, write a poem. The proliferation

of online blogs in our own time is testament to the desire to cry, “Hey, I exist. This is me.”

By collecting and documenting her passport photographs over some sixty years, the woman in this

book demarcated her life in black and white, declaring her existence (even if only to herself).

It’s difficult to imagine a more minimalist autobiography, a lifetime compressed into just 75 extremely

similar photographs.

It’s a memoir that invites reader participation, an act of imagination. We’re dealing here with a kind of

archaeology- reconstructing a life based on the barest minimum of evidence. There are no backgrounds here, no details or hints of a life lived beyond the photographers’ booth. There’s an aridness to these images, a claustrophobia. We find ourselves speculating, inventing lovers, children, triumphs and failures, wondering why she glows in one image and exudes such severity the next.

But ultimately, all we have to go on is that level, intense stare, the surface differences of clothing and

hair. In almost every picture, She’s impeccably presented. Even when the lighting is unforgiving and she can’t bring herself to smile (which is often), Her appearance is as considered as a Renaissance aristocrat sitting for a portrait. She maintains a careful neutrality. Not for her the extremes of fashion. She strives for bland perfection, the appea-rance of the everywoman and in doing so reveals, perhaps, her insecurity. Would her world end if she let a hair slip out of place?

From Her meticulous dating, we know She lived through momentous events: the Second World War,

Vietnam, Suez, the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landings, the Cold War, the list goes on and on. Her life spanned, roughly, the most bloody and extreme century in human history. The human race almost ceased to exist on a dozen different occasions. Yet all remains quiet in the photography booth- the repetitive poses and expressions remind us of how little we really change, how constant ordinary lives are. Sure, her beauty fades. She tries a different hairstyle, experiments with lipstick, but remains emphatically the same woman, seemingly unaffected by, well, anything much. Her photographs mark time as relentlessly as the ticking of a clock.

And then- just when we think we have the measure of her- she disappears. The last photograph is dated

1978. She doesn’t look old. In fact, she seems as robust, healthy and relaxed as she has done in years. Finally, then, we are left with a last, open invitation: we must invent an end to her story. Of course, the choices we make will say as much about us as they do her.

A KesselsKramer book. December 2007. Collected and edited by Erik Kessels. Designed by Erik Kessels. Words by Christian Bunyam. Published by KesselsKramer Publishing, Lauriergracht 39, 1016 RG Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Publisher contact: Kyra Müller, kyra@kesselskramer.nl Distributed by Idea Books, idea@ideabooks.nl and Critiques Livres, critiques.livres@wanadoo.fr Pre-press and printing Calff & Meischke Amsterdam, binding Hexpoor in an edition of 2,000 copies. ISBN 978-90-70478-15-5 www.kesselskramerpublishing.com

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