Plastic Sea

One of the most astonishing aspects of the collaboration between writer Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra is that the more complex a topic, the sharper the duo manage to bring it into focus, ultimately making their most ambitious projects also easily the best and certainly most interesting ones. There is little to be gained from speculating why this might be the case. Occam’s Razor would tell us that the most obvious explanation is the most likely one: where most photographers are individualistic creatures who often are almost allergic to getting good advice from anyone, here a photographer and a writer are engaged in long-term collaborations, helping each other — and their viewers and readers — grow. Having covered Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet project before, Hornstra and Van Bruggen have now put their focus on Europe, in their own words “a ten-year investigation into contemporary Europe”. I have not followed The Europeans as closely as The Sochi Project (in part…