A long marriage beautifully captured in new photography book

Two pictures next to each other of an old man and and old woman kneeling on the beach.

(Image credit: Erik Kessels)

last updated 12 October 2022

Dutch artist Erik Kessels tells the visual story of an Italian couple, Carlo and Luciana, in his new photography book, In Almost Every Picture #17.

Every year on their holiday, the couple from Vignola in Modena, Italy, photographed each other in the same location. At the start of their marriage, the photographs are in black and white before the couple take almost a 40 year break from holidaying to concentrate on their working life. Once retired, the images begin again in colour as the couple resumed their travels around the world.

The book reflects this long gap with blank pages in the middle of their story. ‘When people look at this book, it’s almost like a pause,’ says Kessels. ‘We live in a time where we see more images before lunch than someone in the 18th century saw in their whole lifetime, so it is nice to see this compressed history of all the images two people ever made on their travels in this way.’

Black and white image of an elderly man and woman at the beach

The images were developed by Sergio Smerieri, a studio owner and friend of the couple. After Luciania’s death and before his own, Carlo assisted him in providing missing photographs and negatives. All 36 images from each roll of film were included in their albums, making a small but comprehensive collection.

‘I find it a bit tragic, but it’s also special,’ says Kessels. ‘It’s fascinating that in a time where we now make a photographic record of ourselves, it becomes bizarre to see only five or six family albums containing all their life in pictures. Nowadays it’s totally different – but in the end those family albums are still surviving, while we lose a lot of our digital images. It will be funny to see what will remain from this period of time in the future.’

Although we never see the couple together, we see glimpses of who they were and how they felt about each other – Carlo adopts various poses, always looking away from the camera, while Luciana looks straight down the lens with a smile reserved only for her husband the photographer.

The book is the latest in the In Almost Every Picture series, which tell the stories of amateur photographers through images taken over the years. ‘Sometimes they don’t even know themselves what kind of fantastic record of images they have made over the years,’ adds Kessels. ‘In this book the special thing is they have skipped so many years. Pandemic aside, it would never have occurred to us to wait until we had stopped working before we could travel again.’

4 Photos. Two colour, one of an elderly man eating and one of an elderly woman eating. Two black and white photos of the same couple sitting on a bridge.

A black and white photo of a man and a woman posing separately on a wall in a book by Erik Kessels

INFORMATION

erikkessels.com

Hannah Silver is the Art, Culture, Watches & Jewellery Editor of Wallpaper*. Since joining in 2019, she has overseen offbeat art trends and conducted in-depth profiles, as well as writing and commissioning extensively across the worlds of culture and luxury. She enjoys travelling, visiting artists' studios and viewing exhibitions around the world, and has interviewed artists and designers including Maggi Hambling, William Kentridge, Jonathan Anderson, Chantal Joffe, Lubaina Himid, Tilda Swinton and Mickalene Thomas.