Erik Kessels, Talk Soon, 2021

Talk Soon is the wordless quarantined dialogue between Dutch artist Erik Kessels and French artist Thomas Sauvin. Every day, throughout that tumultuous spring of 2020, Erik and Thomas sent one another idiosyncratic, uncaptioned photographs; catalysing an organic, free-associative exchange of some 120 archival images. Atelier Éditions’ author Kingston Trinder then composed an equally free-associative, altogether-whimsical narrative with which to further entwine the duo’s eclectic photographs. These two archives of vernacular photography, one from the East, the other from the West, achieve a dialogue through the recurrence of photographic practices, aesthetics, and subjects. Talk Soon, a tearaway postcard book, allows readers to endlessly juxtapose the delightful photographs selected by the two quarantined artists.