Read Naked
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Edition of 500
Signed & Numbered
16 x 24 cm
148 pages
Hardcover hotfoil printed
Published by Skinnerboox, Sep 2019
ISBN 978-88-94895-25-4
Erik Kessels
25,00 €
This book highlights the entertaining idea of being completely naked while poring over a book. These pictures spark some peculiar curiosities. Who are these men and women and why were these photos made? Perhaps more importantly, what are they reading and are they enjoying themselves?
While assembling this collection of ‘found' images, a thought arose: isn’t reading in the nude a wonderful thing. A notion seemingly from a bygone era, when we would happily spend whole days in bed not worrying about whether we were wasting time. A period when we had much less shame of our bodies, when being naked did not necessarily mean being exposed.
Therefore, to encourage the growth of this bizarre and fantastic phenomenon we invite you to submit your own ‘reading nude’. To allow yourself to be liberated between the pages.
DID YOU READ NAKED?
PROVE IT!
WWW.READNAKED.ORG
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Erik Kessels (b. 1966, Netherlands) is an artist, designer and curator with great interest in photography. Erik Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and works for national and international clients such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra, Citizen M and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel.
As an artist and curator Kessels has published over 70 books of his 're-appropriated' images: Missing Links (1999), The Instant Men (2000), in almost every picture (2001-2019) and Shit (2018). Since 2000, he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography and has written the international bestseller Failed It!
For the DVD art project Loud & Clear he worked together with artists such as Marlene Dumas and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Kessels writes regular editorials for numerous international magazines. He lectured at the D&AD Presidents Lecture and at several international design conferences such as in Singapore, Goa, NY, Toronto and Bangkok. He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Écal (Lausanne), Raffles (Milan) and at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture where he curated a celebration of amateurism.
In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2017-2019 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Budapest and Düsseldorf and exhibited this year in the MOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Vogue (Italia).
