Proposol for a
‘CITY PHOTOGRAPHER’
Rotterdam
2009
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In 2009 Floor de Haas and me wrote a proposal for the appointment of an official ‘City Photographer’ for Rotterdam.
The local city-archive showed a huge gap for images over a great period of time, while for a lot of the pictures archived, fees had to be paid to ever so many photographers and/or their heirs.
It was simply undoable to really unlock this rich archive for a bigger audience.
At the same time, Rotterdam had been using images for ‘city branding’ that showed mainly skylines and other usual-suspect-subjects, leading to, in our opinion, a bit of a superficial image of the town we lived in: a lot of aspects of city-life were left out of this shiny picture.
Wasn’t there a photographer in our midst that could act as a ‘third eye’ and unlock other stories that speak to our imagination?
We did get quite a long way in the talks with the city-archive and the Dutch Fotomuseum about our proposal only to find out that in the middle of the financial crisis funding was an untakable hurdle.
The original proposal became an archive item in itself.
here