Biography
Rein Jelle Terpstra is an artist and educator based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He devotes his practice to photography and the study of perception and reminiscence.
After a two-year residency period at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam), Rein Jelle Terpstra has devoted his practice to photography and the study of perception and reminiscence, likeNabeelden (‘Afterimages’ – on the photograph not taken), Retracing (on remembering images in the wake of blindness) Dark Dunes (on amateur photography in WW2) and the Robert F Kennedy Funeral Train- The People’s View (a photographic reconstruction based on the snapshots and home movies, taken by bystanders along the tracks of the RFK funeral train, in 1968).
Terpstra worked on a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 2017.
His work is held in various collections, including the SFMOMA (San Francisco), MoMA Library (New York), Eye Film Museum (Amsterdam), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), and the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam). In 2019 his book Robert F Kennedy Funeral Train – The People’s View won the Gold Medal for The Most Beautiful Book of the World, Stiftung Buchkunst, Leipzig, Germany. He also teaches at the Minerva Academy of Fine Arts, the Hanze University for Applied Science, Groningen, the Netherlands.