In 2008, Hornstra photographed a worker preparing fish in the canteen of a cement plant in Angarsk, Russia. Photo: Rob Hornstra / Jakopič Gallery
Rob Hornstra: Even everyday life can be iconic
An exhibition of established Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra is coming to the Jakopič Gallery in collaboration with the Fotomoseum Den Haag. His exhibition Ordinary People, which is characterized by iconic images of everyday life, will be presented internationally for the first time.
51-year-old photographer Rob Hornstra in his work, he followed the work of a butcher at his counter, a clerk at a desk or a child at play and thereby tried to create symbols of the moments or places where the photographs were taken. In the past twenty years, by photographing people in their everyday life, Hornstra has created a real human portrait of our time.
Long-term projects
“Rob Hornstra is mainly dedicated to long-term documentary and socially committed projects, and primarily works as a portrait photographer. Over the years, he has developed his characteristic method of classifying images by category, with which he creates bridges between individual photographic series,” the Jakopič Gallery explained.
Hornstra is presented in the Jakopič Gallery as part of exhibitions dedicated to the preservation of memories and cultural heritage and at the same time to a wider social understanding of photography as one of the most expressive, communicative and creative visual media. The exhibition is accompanied by a photo monograph Ordinary People and a special publication in publishing with MGML entitled Where the fire smolders.
Works created in Slovenia
The exhibition, on the other hand, puts predetermined categories in the foreground, into which Hornstra, inspired by the German photographer August Sander classifies his photographs and which form the basis of his series. These are, for example, the categories work, youth and folk customs. “However, his system is not rigid, his portraits can belong to more than one category at the same time. In this way, they do not establish strict typologies, but rather reflect the multifaceted nature of human experience. This approach serves as a guide for the author in his photography and allows him to portray people from different backgrounds, and at the same time, it is because of him, consciously or unconsciously, that he creates connections between people that transcend national borders,” the gallery says.
Along with more than seventy group and individual portraits, on Wednesday at 7 p.m., when the exhibition opens, a selection of the author’s works created in Slovenia from the series will also be presented Europeans (2020-2030). The series was created in collaboration with the writer Arnold van Bruggen. Together, they embarked on a ten-year search for a modern European at a time when Europe is facing a crisis. The portraits, taken in the area of Carinthia and Styria in the period before the recent parliamentary elections, not only testify to the stories of the people in the photographs, but also highlight their social roles. The photographer’s goal is to capture the portrait subjects in the lens in such a way that they will be with us in the future – not as individuals, but as bearers of the meanings they represent.
