‘The Sochi Project’ was born in 2007 from the will of Rob Hornstra and Arnold Van Bruggen’s to tell the story of the city of Sochi, Russia, site of the controversial Winter Olympic Games that took place earlier this year. The city is located on the border of the conflict zone Abkhazia and, across the Caucasus Mountains, the poor republics of North Ossetia and Chechnya.

The city is today unrecognizable, but long before it received the international media attention, the authors travelled repeatedly to the region. Here, they carried out a solid research and documentation in order to depict the relationship between the complex reality of the place and the glamorous event represented by the Olympics, the most expensive in history.

Rob Hornstra and Arnold Van Bruggen, born in the Netherlands, respectively work as documentary photographer and as writer and filmmaker, both of them embracing the methods of slow journalism. The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus is the first comprehensive publication dedicated to the project, which can be explored online at thesochiproject.org.

Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen
The Sochi Project: an Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus
Photographs by Rob Hornstra,
texts by Arnold van Bruggen 
Aperture / The Sochi Project, 2013
512 pp., 80.00 $