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 because of the different funding structures). But the basic approach seems very similar, except that now, the duo picks a particular locale/region and dives into it — as opposed to focusing on a specific topic.
“Across Europe, we see nationalism rising,” they write, “democracies under pressure, and war back on the continent. The political dream of a united and peaceful Europe seems increasingly fragile.”
In a world where the world of photography increasingly focuses on festivals organized around some incredibly vague and (by design) toothless theme — that can mean everything and (this is the idea:) nothing — Hornstra and Van Bruggen’s approach certainly is most welcome for me. Your mileage obviously might vary.
I personally do not expect every photographer to address the ills they can find near their personal door steps. But for me a problem arises if somehow, people like Hornstra and Van Bruggen become rare exceptions. It would be nice if more photographers find the courage to address the mess around them in their work.
This is not to say that The Europeans only focuses on what ails Europe. You need to keep in mind that it is a long-term project, and its overall message (if that is even the word) will only arise from the combination of its constituent parts. Some of the parts simply will have more juice than others — in part because some parts of Europe are not as exposed to what is increasingly dividing the continent than others.
“More than half of Europe’s imported vegetables come from this region,” the text in Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm states (p. 77), “this region” being southern Spain. The reality behind cheap vegetables in supermarkets all across Europe is grim, though, and it ties in with some of the largest issues wrecking the continent’s democracies: the rise of the far right and immigration.
Across the 264 pages of the book, Hornstra and Van Bruggen present the various aspects of this complex that cannot be neatly disentangled in a clear and extremely insightful fashion.
In lesser and less experienced hands, there simply would be too many details and aspects to cover. But with years of collaborative efforts under their belts, the photographer-writer team manages to simultaneously convey both the scale of the ecological devastation brought to a region covered in endless plastic (under which the produce grows) and the very personal devastation brought to those who in some form are small cogs in this system, whether they are the owners of bars, greenhouse workers, small-business owners, or whatever else.
Essentially, the larger topics mentioned above become tethered to the personal, and the entanglement and complexity of what is on view becomes very clear. For example, the same small-business owners that generate some of their business using migrant workers vote for the kinds of far-right parties that promise to get rid off them (the migrants, not the business [even though in reality that is exactly what’s going to happen]).
The migrant workers, many of whom arrived from far-away locales in Africa, are caught in a system that relies on them while offering them very little — if anything. And they are only the migrant workers that somehow managed to arrive in southern Spain. Many others lie in the watery grave that is the Mediterranean Sea — just below what the book calls the Plastic Sea.
Of course, the basic story conveyed in Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm is not confined to the European Union. You will not have to swap out too many details to arrive at a very similar situation in many other parts of the world, including the United States (where these words are being written).
What makes the work so compelling is how seemingly effortlessly the larger story is being told while a large number of individuals from a large number of backgrounds get to tell part of their personal story. Without these details, the story would be too abstract, inviting the kinds of simple solutions and/or explanations that have fueled the rise of far-right parties.
At its core, though, the larger story is a collection of small, personal dramas. You could have a conversation around whether some of these dramas deserve to be considered before others. But even though neoliberal capitalism is trying to tell us otherwise, life is neither a competition nor a zero-sum game. Sometimes, we all lose — even if there are cheap vegetables on supermarket shelves.
Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm; photographs by Rob Hornstra; text by Arnold van Bruggen; 264 pages (with additional 32 page insert); The Europeans; 2026
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