Erik Kessels, Muddy Dance, 2021

Muddy Dance celebrates the movement in a game of football (aka soccer). The players perform a seemingly choreographed dance on a muddy pitch, leaping, twirling, and tumbling in their pursuit to control the ball. The athletes’ normally acrobatic endeavour is only further complicated by rainy weather and a waterlogged field of grass. Erik Kessels has made a football photobook for art lovers which is simultaneously an art book for every football fan. With vintage action shots of famously muddy matches dug from football and sports archives, Kessels demonstrates yet another act of reappropriating vernacular photography.