In 2014 the Winter Olympics will take place in Sochi, Russia, a small town on the shores of the Black Sea where the temperature rarely falls below 7°C. Snow is practically nonexistent in this seaside resort, and that’s not the only factor that makes it an unlikely location for an international sporting event. It’s close to Cherkessia, North Ossetia and Chechnya, and just 20 miles away from Abkhazia, another conflict zone. It’s hoped that the Winter Olympics will transform the town and the entire region, and thousands of people are already hard at work building the stadiums and hotels needed to host it.
 
Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra, a member of the Institute for Artist Management, and reporter Arnold van Bruggen, are there to document the changes but, as they point out, “Dutch newspapers and magazines do not have the budget or manpower to realise a project of this scale”. In order to finance their five-year-long work, they launched The Sochi Project instead, a crowd-funding initiative.
 
People power
Crowd funding isn’t new – it’s been used in the film and music industries for more than a decade. In France, My Major Company lets listeners support musical artists, promising them a return if they back a rising star. Hornstra and van Bruggen have adapted the formula for The Sochi Project, and they’ve raised more than €28,000 so far.
 
Financial backers can donate as little as €10, which grants them a Bronze status. If they donate more than €100 they gain Silver status, while a €1000 donation gives admittance to the elite Gold circle. These donors must be taken care of, warns Hornstra. “People won’t donate unless they get something in return,” he says, explaining that his donors get access to a private section of the site where he and van Bruggen publish regular updates on Sochi. Donors also gain access to exclusive photo series, interviews, behind-the-scenes videos and original raw files of Hornstra’s photographs.
 
Silver members can attend a series of exhibitions, readings and presentations for free, and also receive exclusive publications produced each year by The Sochi Project in association with design firm Kummer & Herrman. Gold donors get a “special collector’s box for five original prints and articles” and can meet with the two reporters.
 
It’s innovative, but it isn’t Hornstra’s first foray in the entrepreneurial world. He’s already self-publishing most of his books, and has done so for quite some time. “It was too expensive to publish a book as a student,” he says. So he held a one-month pre-sale of 100 copies, which helped fund the €7500 production. To reward the first 100 buyers, he included all of their names at the end of the book. “The designers had to be convinced,” he says. “But a photobook isn’t about the photographer, it’s about the story, and it would not have been possible to produce that book without these 100 first buyers.”
 
Hornstra’s approach has made him more than a simple photographer, a fact he happily points out. “You’re not just a photographer any more, you’re an entire company,” he says. “You handle the marketing, the sales, budgeting. You handle everything. You have to make people aware of the story.”
 
For The Sochi Project, Hornstra is mixing new media with guerrilla-style marketing campaigns, posting ads around Rome and New York, sometimes at his own risk – in New York, he was forced to take down his posters when city officials threatened him with a fine. That doesn’t deter him. “Right now we are in the middle of the production of a multifunctional-free-guerrilla-exhibition-newspaper for early September”, he says, adding that it will be distributed across seven European cities.
 
www.thesochiproject.org
www.kummer-herrman.nl
www.instituteartistmanagement.com