Photography in Abundance

In Photography in Abundance, Erik Kessels has collected a million private photos that were readily available on image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines like Google, uploaded over a period of twenty-four hours. The photos were then printed out and are now scattered freely around the exhibition site, creating a gigantic pile of a million private memories, which visitors are encouraged to step onto or dive into. With this pool of analogue photos, Kessels raises awareness of today’s rapid consumption of digital images on the internet, when in fact the one million copies are a mere drop in the ocean compared to the estimated total of three hundred million pictures that are uploaded onto Facebook every day. The project indicates the shift in how we consume huge amounts of data and whether their physicality changes their privacy status or voyeuristic pleasures. As Kessels states, “By printing all the images uploaded in a twenty-four-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other people’s experiences.”