Ordinarily, I would have simply introduced my conversation with Rob Hornstra with his history as a photographer, most notably his work with writer Arnold van Bruggen in the Caucasus: The Sochi Project. That work entailed a large number of highly successful self-published photobooks, all of them crowdfunded at a time when such an approach was only beginning to become more widely used. It ended up getting the pair being banned from Russia. There now is a new project, The Europeans, which follows similar ideas in a different setting.
Lots of nice work on display in the new issue of Visura Magazine from Institute for Artist Management photographers including Joshua Lutz, Simon Norfolk, Paul Shambroom, Jodi Bieber and Rob Hornstra:
Another dva favorite, there’s a short video interview up on vimeo with Rob Hornstra talking about his process and how his books come together. Definitely worth a watch.
You can’t eat ‘reach’ and we can’t pay salaries with ‘brand awareness’. I don’t pretend to know other people’s business models or strategies. But successful business practices are always about having a close understanding of the costs of what you produce and the origins and mechanics of your revenues and more than anything else the interaction between the two.
With the 2014 Winter Olympic Games kicking off this week, the world will get a fast and likely incomplete introduction to Sochi, Russia.. But for Dutch …
With the 2014 Winter Olympic Games kicking off this week, the world will get a fast and likely incomplete introduction to Sochi, Russia. But for Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen, Sochi is familiar territory
“Winter Olympics in a subtropical resort. Surrounded by conflict zones. The most expensive Games ever. This is the idea being realized in Sochi.” So begins “An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus,” a photo book, published by Aperture, by the photographer Rob Hornstra and the writer Arnold van Bruggen, the final chapter of their long-term collaboration, The Sochi Project.
Your little town in the middle of (seemingly) nowhere might not have a fancy or even a simple art museum or gallery. But I’m sure there’ll be a wall somewhere, and you don’t need much of a budget, either (the newsprint posters are available as a set for 35 Euros
Rob Hornstra’s latest book is on the restaurant singers of Russia’s favorite Black Sea resort town of Sochi. Any self-respecting restaurant on the coast has a live house singer to belt out sappy Russian chansons—take a vodka-soaked ballad and drop in a techno beat, all at full volume—from behind an electric keyboard or a laptop.
Rob Hornstra, who we’ve featured a number of times, had a film crew from Vice TV follow him around in his home in Utrect, Netherlands and in Sochi, Russia while working on “The Sochi Project”, an epic 5-year project he is working on with writer Arnold van Bruggen
Institute for Artist Management’s blog just published a full view of Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen’s new book “Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land”
The Dutch photographers shared a similar analog ethos as well as an enthusiasm for doing work that is extremely personal to them, and important for the public to appreciate. But most important about the Dutch photographers was their DIY sensibility that told photographers not to wait for editors and publishers to find their work but to go out there and make it themselves.
Due to my general laziness after the holidays I see that Andrew Phelps, the fine photographer and blogger of the booksite Buffet, has beaten me to the punch by mentioning Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen’s newest publication Sanatorium.
The artists Institute represents are Jodi Bieber, Rena Effendi, Lauren Greenfield, Rob Hornstra, Nadav Kander, Gillian Laub, James Longley, Gerd Ludwig, Joshua Lutz, Amanda Micheli, Richard Mosse, Zed Nelson, Jehad Nga, Simon Norfolk, James Pomerantz and Paul Shambroom.
