MAN | Erik Kessels & Karel De Mulder

Erik Kessels and Karel De Mulder’s new book MAN (RVB Books, Paris, 2025) is a meditation on a visual trope as old as photography itself: the man in the middle, flanked by women, in group photographs. At first glance, the premise seems almost too simple, one man, surrounded, standing precisely where the eye is drawn. Yet MAN turns this familiar arrangement into something quietly provocative, asking whether this composition is intentional, instinctual, or simply habitual. Is it the residue of gender norms, or just the way people line up without thinking? And perhaps most intriguingly: will this arrangement fade in an era of changing social dynamics, or will it persist as long as cameras capture groups of men and women together?

The book itself is a compact but weighty object! 11 × 16 cm, softcover with dust jacket, 768 pages of colour reproductions, containing 378 photographs. Most are drawn from vernacular sources: family snapshots, group portraits, casual archives. They aren’t staged as art, but presented as found images with a shared logic, the man at the centre, balanced symmetrically by women on either side. Sequenced carefully, the photographs don’t just illustrate a quirk; they frame a pattern, inviting readers to reflect on why this composition recurs so reliably across cultures and decades.

For Erik Kessels, this fascination with patterns in everyday imagery is nothing new. The Dutch artist, designer, and curator has long been celebrated for uncovering the humour, poignancy, and cultural meaning in overlooked or discarded photography. Through his books and exhibitions, he isolates recurring motifs, awkward gestures, accidental mistakes, strange repetitions and asks what they reveal about human behaviour. MAN continues this tradition, turning attention to a particular composition that is at once ordinary and telling.

His co-author, Brussels-based artist and creative Karel De Mulder, brings a complementary sensibility. Trained in advertising and shaped by both commercial and artistic practice, De Mulder has built a career on examining visual clichés and cultural habits. His projects often probe the rituals and narratives embedded in everyday photography. Together, he and Kessels create a book that is more than an anthology of quirky pictures; it is a commentary on the persistence of visual hierarchies and the unconscious framing of gender roles.

MAN works on several levels. It is an archive, showing just how widespread this composition is, and how it changes, or doesn’t, across time and geography. It is also an essay in visual sociology, raising questions about why men so often occupy the central space in group photographs. Is it a symbolic assertion of importance, a holdover from patriarchal values, or simply the result of convenience (the tallest in the middle, the father figure in front)? Most importantly, it demonstrates how even the most casual snapshots are embedded with structures of power, symmetry, and meaning.

At a time when issues of gender, representation, and equality are at the forefront of cultural conversation, MAN joins not by arguing, but by showing. It illuminates the unnoticed, asking us to look again at the ordinary. In doing so, it transforms an age-old photographic habit into a mirror of our collective instincts and biases. Simple in concept but complex in implication, MAN is a book that will appeal to students of photography, design, and visual culture as much as to anyone interested in the subtleties of how we picture ourselves.

FOLLOW ERIK HERE | FOLLOW KAREL HERE | PURCHASE THE BOOK HERE