In this short documentary video from TIME, Dutch creative Erik Kessels explains his interest in amateur photography, including where it started and what he sees in it. What started as simply buying discarded family photo albums has now stirred an interest with the mortality of an image, where with the proliferation of sites like Flickr and Instagram, photographs now have a much shorter lifecycle. This culminates in a very interesting exhibition, featured at the end of the video.
The exhibition, titled "24 HRS IN PHOTOS" shows the mass amount of images created by people all the world over, in just a single day. Prints cover the floor and stack up very tall.
If the name Erik Kessels sounds familiar to you, you might recall and article from a few years back that asked the question, "Is the Photo Album Dead?" by Dave Geffen. Dave asked readers if they were still creating albums and noted Kessels' current exhibition at that time, Album Beauty.
So what do you think? Are you like me in that you regularly are capturing digital images that have a very short life cycle, if they have any life at all? Think of a recent photo you took that was exceptional. If you shared it on social media, how long was it until you posted something else and that image became forgotten, buried beneath something new? One thing is definitely true, as Kessels himself pointed out, we are producing and consuming more photography than ever before, but hardly stop to look at them.
