I am always interested in other people, and in how
people think about other people.
So what I try to do in photography is to play with
these prejudices.
I don't want to say to people, you are wrong or your idea
about other people is wrong.
I also don't want to say, you're right.
But I just want people to think about it.
My name is Rob Hornstra.
I'm a photographer, but I consider myself as a
storyteller, a documentary maker, slow journalism.
It's not so much about photography, but I use this
medium to tell stories.
I graduated in 2004, from the Art Academy, and I'm working
now, for seven years, independent, on mostly long
term projects.
I'm from Holland, so here we are in Utrecht.
And from here, I'm going out to other countries sometimes,
Russia, Iceland, I hope some more in the
future, but not too many.
I just don't feel that I'm the type of person who will travel
anywhere for one month just to see a country, to meet the
people over there, and get a few shots or something.
I want to go deeper and it has its disadvantages because now
many people call me the Russia photographer.
I'm convinced that I'm not a Russia photographer.
But I'm just focusing for, maybe 10 or
15 years, on Russia.
So at the end of my life, people will see that I also
did other things.
At least, I hope that I have time left for that.
This is, maybe, nice to see because it's
like the older series.
This is my graduation project.
I graduated in 2004 with a book,
"Communism and Cowgirls".
For one month, I went to Russia and I focuses,
particularly , on the younger m the first generation who
grew up after the fall of Communism.
The West became extremely popular, like, Coca-Cola and
Ramstein was extremely popular.
I didn't only photograph them, but I also made photos of the
places they're living in.
But also, for example, of their grandparents.
This contrast was especially fascinating to me.
When I finished the art academy, I was quite sure
that, with the work I made in Russia, I
wanted to make a book.
And of course, I couldn't find a publisher.
And then I started to investigate how much it would
cost to print this book, an offset print, a real book.
And it was seven and a half thousand euro for 250 copies.
And I was completely shocked.
But on the other hand, I was working as a bartender, and I
explained this to my colleagues.
And then this colleague immediately said, I want to
buy a copy in advance, so here you have 30 euro and maybe you
could sell some more copies in advance.
And maybe it's possible.
And it worked.
The book sold out within three, four months.
So that's good.
Got the money back and I printed my first book.
And as a result of this, at a certain point, I was asked for
a commission in Iceland.
And I did a project over there, also interested,
especially, by the young generation doing nothing in
these villages.
Then this Iceland book, I started a new pre-sale, and it
sold out within three days, instead of three
weeks or four weeks.
So I did it again in 2008.
My third book "101 Billionaires" and what
happened was that it sold out within a
few hours, this pre-sale.
At that moment, Russia had 101 billionaires, and what I
showed actually was the 99% of the rest of the country.
Well, every morning I have to do shift some books, the
orders which come in.
And it's not that difficult.
That's it, actually.
This is for today, so we'll bring it to the post office.
The difficulty is, of course, when you are self-published,
is that you have to organize everything by yourself.
So you start with finding a designer.
You have to work with writers, with a translator.
You have to find a budget, you have to find money, organize
the payments, of course.
And when you finish it, the book is finally there.
Then you also have to ship all the books.
So it's a lot of work.
On the other hand, I believe that if you publish the books
yourself, you are completely free in whatever you want to
do with the book.
The only thing I care about is that I want to tell my story.
I'll have to sell this book, but it's really secondary.
I want to make this book and I believe that, if I tell the
story in a perfect way, that people will be interested.
That's actually my only idea behind it.
In 2008, right at the moment that I published "101
Billionaires", I was approached by a writer, Arnold
van Bruggen.
I was already working with him, also for "101
Billionaires".
And he told me about Olympic Winter Games in Sochi.
It was announced in 2007.
And Arnold tried to convince me to do a long term project
about the region around Sochi.
The goal of this project is to document it for five years and
to make an atlas of the region in words and images.
Sochi is over here, quite far to the west and to
the south, of course.
And actually, what you see over here is the whole Soviet
Union, but partly, the lighter brown is Russia.
And Sochi is near the Black Sea, so it's a holiday resort.
And from Sochi, you go straight up into the
mountains, the Caucasus Mountains, into the more or
less troubled republics, Chechnya, Dagestan,
Ingushetia.
It borders Georgia, borders Abkhazia, also a conflict zone
where a lot of things go on right now.
So I just arrived last night in Sochi, from Utrecht,
Amsterdam, Moscow, Sochi.
We're now on the 15th floor of the Hotel Zhemchuzhina, which
means the pearl.
It's a hotel built in the end the '90s, end
of the Soviet times.
And I think, actually, that the view you have over here
from Zhemchuzhina, is one of the most
brilliant views in Sochi.
I took already many photos.
What we, for example, want to do is to show what kind of
place Sochi is.
And Sochi is really a tourist resort, but maybe things are
little bit different than you expect.
And this is also kind of an aim or goal for me, within
photography, to tell stories which make people think and
maybe they start to reconsider their prejudice.
What we tried to do is to document this region to give a
good view also because you can be sure that, around these
Olympic Games, there will be a big facade from Russia to show
how great and fantastic everything is.
We are, right now, at the area where they
built the Olympic stadiums.
What we see over here is really a journalistic picture,
I think, because it's the new stadiums and the old houses,
all in one shot.
I don't like this kind of picture, by the way.
That's really what the journalists like.
It explains, actually, the situation.
But I do not really like it for my work.
It tells you too much.
It's like exactly what it is.
It doesn't leave anything to your imagination.
Slow of journalism is a little bit strange description of
what we are doing.
Actually, this term was invented, I think, by someone
in the Netherlands.
And I believe slow journalism is similar to documentary.
And I believe, actually, that the big difference is that
journalism is focusing on what is happening, and slow
journalism is more why these things are happening.
Now what's this?
This food is really amazing.
What you see over here is what will be the main stadium.
On the first of April, this year, 2011, we started the
third year of the Sochi project.
So at a certain point, I came up with the idea--
We were sitting in a restaurant and there was a
singer starting his show again, which in the
restaurant, in Sochi, always means that you cannot talk
with each other any more.
And this is actually a really typical Russian cultural
thing, but even more typical for Sochi.
So what I will do, in the upcoming days in Sochi, is
investigate if it can be a good subject for a new
publication.
Last night we went to a cafe restaurant, [INAUDIBLE] which
means South.
And it looked like a very interesting place, beautiful
background, some interesting details like a [INAUDIBLE]
standing on the right, and there was a nice toilet sign
near the stage.
So there must be a good picture in it.
I was happy with it.
So when we started this project we
decided we need money.
And we cannot rely on magazines and newspapers, just
the story everybody's telling.
So we wanted to do something different.
And we looked to the U.S., and what we saw over there was
kickstarter.com and spot.us, both crowd funding sites.
And they were very interesting to us because we didn't notice
in the Netherlands and we were almost sure that we didn't see
it in Europe yet.
So we tried to copy this model from the U.S. Many people were
interested in it and started donating, not enough to do
what we want to do, but it's a really big amount of money.
And we hope we can make it for five years.
In 2009, we started by making our first trip and we came to
the idea to make a publication about sanatoriums in Sochi.
Sanatoriums are extremely important and
Russians like it a lot.
We decided to stay there for almost two weeks and to do
exactly what Russians also do.
You have to go in the mineral bath, massage, and you get
like an electric loaded clay treatment and those kind of
things, very interesting to see for us.
And then we heard that, because of the Olympic games,
they want to change them into four or five star hotels.
And that's the reason why we decided to make the first
publication about sanatoriums because that's the only way we
can preserve this history.
There are only a few boxes left with the last really big
book, Empty Land or [INAUDIBLE].
We were already working, at that time, for four years in
the neighboring country of Abkhazia which is really
neighboring the Olympic stadiums within five
kilometers, so it's walking distance.
So the second year, we made a book completely about
Abkhazia, and it's a very complicated story over there.
Actually, this country is isolated because it's not
recognized by any country in the world until 2008.
Russia decided to recognize Abkhazia as
an independent country.
it's an extremely complicated story, so in the end, it also
became an extremely book.
It's a big historical, political
document about this region.
We are in a hurry tonight, because I actually want to do
five restaurants.
That's quite a lot, but they are very close.
We're now in the center of Sochi and hope to do five.
So we have to hurry.
What we realized immediately is that we cannot make such a
big document as we did in Abkhazia, within a few months.
We worked on this for four years.
So our idea came to do a more simple subject.
We cannot do such a big book, but we can do these Sochi
singers, the lounge singers.
That will be, probably, our new publication in 2011.
I'm making a series about musicians in restaurants.
And the most beautiful is, if I have a big interior, well, I
will have it over here, and if you sing like you do, what you
also normally do, so don't pay too much attention to me.
Sometimes look at the camera, and then, finally, it will be
a brilliant picture.
And in 2013, we will probably make our end book a really big
book and what he call the atlas about
the region of Sochi.
This will be combined with a really big exhibition in, we
hope, many places in Europe, around the Olympic Games.
Well, I think I will be here earlier before the Olympics.
But actually what we do, we also try to present projects
in different ways.
We don't have to think about these newspapers and
magazines any more.
We don't have to think about all traditional ways to tell a
story, especially, because I'm self published.
And there are many self publishers.
You don't have to think in a way that documentary makers
did it 20 years ago.
We can do, actually, anything, because nobody tells us,
nobody tells us what to do, actually,
so we can do anything.
And that's really good about these times.