In Almost Every Picture.

In Almost Every Picture #6.

Ad-man and photography fanatic Erik Kessels is a partner in communications/publishing company KesselsKramer. It's a Dutch house dedicated to producing unique media products and also printing limited edition books featuring found photography. One of the company's ongoing series is called In Almost Every Picture which assembles estate sale, flea market, or gifted photos in single-subject books. With eight issues, the subject matter has been as varied as a rabbit with a flat, object-balancing head (the pre-cursor to those wacky Stuff on Cats pic books), to a carnival gun toting woman who rigged a camera to snap her photo whenever she shot at a target at the fair game booth.

She was married to an adoring photo enthusiast. #1.

The photos are always part of a series that tells a story over time. The first issue published many of the hundreds of pictures snapped by an unknown husband of his fetching, anonymous wife over their loving marriage. Kessels found the 400 or so photos in a box at a Barcelona flea market and saved them from the rain. He held on to them for years before printing them up in the premier In Almost Every Picture. The brisk sales of the now sold out issue, and a well-attended gallery exhibition of the book's contents proved that people love to look at others' memories on paper.

The twins in issue #4.

In Almost Every Picture #4 a set of twins are shown on their vacations, holidays, special occasions, and photo worthy days dressed nearly identically over a number of years. In the WWII time frame, the series takes a mysterious and seemingly tragic twist when the photos become portraits of one sister, an empty space marking the absence of her other half.

Passport autobiography from #6.

The sixth issue of the series is a vast collection of a single woman's passport photos over a period of sixty years. It's an autobiography in tiny black and white photobooth snaps; a no frills life story.

A slide show of the fair game femme from issue #7.

The simple notion of this series is so richly engaging. Boxes and boxes of photos are ubiquitous sights at flea markets and antique shops. I love thumbing through them, and you all know how much I enjoy the Flickr universe. Looking at others' photos is the ultimate in people watching, but having little to no information beyond the images themselves make the activity of photo viewing a lovely foray into storytelling. Who? Why? What happened? It is what you think it is. Open endings from beautiful beginnings.

All images from the KesselsKramer website.