Short bio:
After a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam), I began investigating the relationships between perception, memory and history, by making slideshow installations and books.

My work is held in various collections, including the collection of the SFMOMA (San Francisco), MoMA Library (New York), EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam), Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam) and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). Furthermore, as an educator I am associated with the Minerva Fine Art Academy, University of Applied Science, Groningen (NL).
During the spring of 2017, I undertook a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, D.C. to do more research on the project RFK Funeral Train – The People’s View.
My book Robert F Kennedy Funeral Train – The People’s View has been awarded a Gold Medal for The Most Beautiful Book of the World, in 2019.

Statement:
As it is well-known for many years, we live in a culture of high-speed production, including fast distribution and presentation of lens-based images.
I’m looking for another relationship with the photograph. Usually, we look straight through a photograph toward the scene that is depicted. Instead, my work often carries the possibility of making this ‘transparent’ medium receivable itself.
I make some of my artworks for public spaces, and other works are with, and about photography. The connection between all my work is to be found in the themes of history and memory, the absence of (photographic) images, reflection on seeing and its residue: what should be physically present, or, what do we need to see in order to generate a memory?
I can’t think of another medium that has such an immediate relationship with memory as photography does. So far this notion has resulted in projects like my vernacular photography archive (approx. 55.000 images), Afterimages, Retracing and Dark Dunes.

Right now I am working on Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train – The People’s View:
a photography- and film project about the Robert F Kennedy funeral train, that rode from New York City to Washington D.C., carrying the dead body of presidential candidate and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on June 8, 1968.

To highlight one project: Afterimages
For the project Afterimages I invited friends and colleagues who were engaged with memory, language, or photography, to write a story about the photo they couldn’t take, but that still keeps haunting them.
This was the invitation I sent (also published in The Photographer’s Playground, publisher Aperture, New York. Edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, 2014):

Dear friend,

We were in a car getting lost in one of Antwerp’s old neighborhoods, trying to find our way back to the ringway. We pulled over for a bit and there I saw them, slowly moving on the pavement: two young girls, identical twins, walking next to each other, their nanny right behind them. The girls each had one eye taped over, the left girl’s right eye, and the right girl’s left eye. Together they saw with one pair of eyes as if to complement each other’s eyesight as if together they could see with full depth of field. How would they see, and what were they, simultaneously, looking at? Probably not at me, who kept on staring at the girls while the car started moving again, the camera sitting on the dashboard.
Many of us carry a photo in our memory: an event or a moment that we saw but failed to capture in a photograph. Perhaps the camera was out of film or the battery empty, or perhaps the moment was simply too important.
Sometimes such perceived moments haunt you like persistent after-images. These images are fluid because never recorded. Perhaps these kinds of after-images will lead you to new thoughts and new stories.
With these considerations, I invite you to write a story about your untaken photographs. The story might be better than the photograph could ever have been.

Warmest regards,

Rein Jelle Terpstra