Unfinished Father

Unfinished Father is Erik Kessels’s book about his father’s half-finished restoration of a Fiat 500, the Topolino, which stopped when his father had a stroke.

Before the stroke Kessels’s father had restored four Fiat 500s and was working on a fifth. Kessels took that last car to Italy and shows it alongside the detailed photographs his father made to document the restoration. The project was exhibited at Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia in 2015 and at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2016, as part of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shortlist. Kessels collected and edited the book, and Angela Lidderdale designed it. According to Kessels’s own site, RVB Books of Paris published a 72-page color softcover with four stickers, 17 by 23 cm, in an edition of 500 signed and numbered copies.

Kessels is a Dutch artist, designer and curator, born in 1966, and has been a creative partner at the agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam since 1996. His site says he has published over 70 books of re-appropriated images and has edited the magazine Useful Photography since 2000.