By any standards, Me TV is an odd photo book. It comprises eight found snapshots of a middle-aged Chinese woman standing in front of her new television set. In each, her pose is identical, right down to way the little finger of her left hand rests on the TV cabinet. Save for the fact that she is wearing a different top in each photograph, they could be the same image reproduced eight times. But, where others might see only the mundane, Erik Kessels, co-publisher of Me TV, along with Thomas Sauvin, sees something much more profound.
"From the very many images I have seen that document TVs in China in the 1980s, these are the among the best," he says. "They tell the story about how big a deal it was to have a new television in China in the 1980s. You can see how proud she is. Plus, the repeated pose is a little bit surreal. The series is both documentary and conceptual, without meaning to be either. This is the beauty of found photography."
Kessels is, among other things, the most mischievous champion of found or vernacular photography. Perhaps as a reaction to the ongoing tidal wave of digital images posted online, interest in vernacular photography from the pre-digital era has increased in recent years with resources such as The Archive of Modern Conflict and Beijing Silvermine proving rich ground for both social historians and photographers who use found images in their practice. To this end, KesselsKramer Publishing, the Amsterdam-based publishing house that Kessels co-runs in tandem with an iconoclastic advertising agency of the same name, is a treasure trove of the absurd and the hilarious. Kessels trawls flea markets, fairs, junk shops and latterly online sites for interesting photo albums which he transforms into photo books that celebrate the obsessive and often accidentally artistic imagination of the amateur photographer.
His magazine, Useful Photography, forgoes art and documentary for images that are purely functional. Issue 2, for instance, is a collection of photographs of objects posted by users of auction websites, while Issue 5 focuses on "the standard method used worldwide to photograph cows and bulls". (You make sure the beast's front legs are on a raised piece of turf so that its back looks horizontal.)
Humour is the unifying undercurrent here as it is in KesselsKramer's series of photo books, In Almost Every Picture, which has now reached Volume 12. My favourite is Volume 9 – How Not To Photograph Your Black Dog. It reproduces a found photo album that catalogues one family's attempts to solve what Kessels calls "one of the biggest mysteries of photography". The results are – for want of a better word – doggedly and spectacularly awful: a series of indistinct portraits of a pet that often looks like a phantom or a blur, not least because the dog is often sitting on a black sofa. It is only though an accidental over-exposure that we finally see the dog clearly at all.
"There is something beautiful about the way people persist in their misfortune with a camera," says Kessels. "It is almost heroic. Then, they put these bad photographs in an album. Incredible! The end result is a kind of anti-manual, a How Not To Do It book." Does he ever manipulate the found images? "I am essentially an editor," he says. "I never manipulate or Photoshop an image but I am looking for the story in these albums so I might move a photograph from one place to another in the narrative to shape the story."
It is this trick of re-contextualising found photographs that is at the heart of what Kessels does so successfully. Trained as an art director, he made his company's name with a now iconic advertising campaign for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam, which played on its word-of-mouth reputation as the worst hotel in the city. Courtesy of KesselsKramer, it is now officially the worst hotel in Amsterdam and bookings have somehow tripled as a result. "Before our campaign, it was just a bad hotel," says Kessels, "Now it is a bad hotel that people really want to stay in because they can tell their friends that they stayed there."
Kessels approaches photography with a similarly irreverent outlook. "For me, serious photography has grown so boring and humourless," he says. "All these photographers with large-format cameras making big landscapes with a power plant in the background and everything so beautiful and perfect. That is something I really hate. What I am looking for is ordinary photographs that tell a a bigger story."
And every photo album is, of course, a story. On average, Kessels tells me, people made eight or nine photo albums in their lifetime, and most of the snapshots in them were taken by men – "The boys owned the camera: it was another toy or gadget to play with." You can track the arc of a person's life though a photo album, says Kessels, and most lives are essentially the same. The first will be about first love: a girlfriend "photographed excessively and often in unnecessary close up". The second will be about the wedding day and the the third "another totally obsessive study, this time of the first child". The fourth to the seventh, he says, are devoted to "the children growing up", while the eighth is "a total mess: home life, holidays, parties and gatherings". The final album is similar to the first one insofar as it is about "two people alone again after all the kids have left home". Back when people made photo albums, says Kessels, "they were recording the circle of their lives, so there is a kind of sadness in these images."
What does he make of the unstoppable surge of digital imagery? "It is what it is and, in a way, photography is flourishing even if some photographers are not. I read somewhere recently that the average person in the west sees more images before lunch than someone living in 1890 would see in their whole life. It's hard to make sense of what that means. Everyone can make a picture look fantastic now just by using an app, so that is not the point any more. Ideas are the key. Ideas are the future."
Kessels most successful publication, In Almost Every Picture Vol. 7, attests to the beauty of a single great idea. Spanning the years 1936 to the present day, it features Rita van Dijk, a Dutchwoman whose life from the age of 16 is recorded in a series of 80 snapshots of her aiming a rifle at a target in a fairground shooting gallery in Tiburg, Netherlands. Every bull's eye triggered a snapshot, so you could say that she shot her own self-portrait over and over again.
Through the album, you see Rita grow old and the faces and fashions around her change, but always the pose is the same: intense and concentrated. Tellingly, the only gap in the chronology is from 1939 to 1945 and there is only one portrait of her without the gun – it was given to her as a consolation prize on a day when the mechanism didn't work at the shooting gallery. Since the book was published, Rita's collected shapshots have been bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Holland.
Recently, as flea market bargains have become rare and dealers seem to know the collectable value of everything they sell, Kessels has inevitably turned to the internet for inspiration. One of his most recent, and perhaps most strange, photo-books, In Almost Every Picture Vol 11, came from a single image he found on Flickr of a woman standing in water in her bathrobe. He made contact with the authors, Fred and Valerie from Florida, who share a passion for "wet fun adventure", which, in this instance, is not quite as kinky as it sounds. Basically, Fred likes to photograph Valerie fully clothed and partially submerged in water. No matter how stylish the clothes she is wearing, Valerie does not seem averse to walking into swimming pools, viaducts, rivers or public fountains.
Having convinced the couple to allow him to make a book, Kessels sent them a waterproof edition and received a snapshot in return of Valerie, fully clothed in their swimming pool, perusing it. "The people I like are amateur obsessives," says Kessels. "They have no limits and no ambitions. They make different choices to artists because they are not thinking of the gallery. They are almost blind to things like good taste because they are in their own zone. You enter their world when you look at their work. It is often a world that may seem strange to the rest of us, but that is also its beauty. That and the stories their photographs tell us."
• This article was amended on 31 March 2014 to clarify that KesselsKramer, the advertising agency, and KesselsKramer Publishing are two different organisations.
