Snelweg > Highways in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is a small country with a population of 16 million people. Space is scarce. We were looking for a metaphor for the transformation of the Dutch landscape (and in a broader perspective Dutch culture) and we decided the highway could showcase the changing country in its frantic rush towards economic progress. As the motto of our project we used J.B. Jackon’s observation “Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places.”
We photographed in a mix of styles – using a variety of cameras and film – reflecting on the changes that had occurred in landscape-photography since the seventies. Every spread of the book was different; we used gatefolds, grids, full-bleed pages and included a typographical landscape made up of the names of underpasses which in the Netherlands are called after the historical locations originally present before the highway was constructed.
Snelweg / Highways was presented in the Netherlands for the first time in 1996 in The Kunsthal in Rotterdam. After problems with established publishers who did not understand our concept we-published the book Snelweg through our own imprint Ideas On Papers.