The Fostinum is a private collection assembled by Fostin Cotchen which holds photographs from the beginning of photography to the present day with particular focus on Central and Eastern European photography (Czech, Slovak, Austrian, German, Russian, etc.), ethnographic photography, modernism, architecture, and humor. Every photograph on this site is held in our collection and available to researchers upon request. While some of the collection is on the official website (www.fostinum.org/), most of it does not fit neatly into certain themes, hence the expansion to Flickr. If there is anything you'd like to see or know more about, please contact us at fostin@outlook.com or visit www.fostinum.org/contact.html.

“The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one — one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.”

- Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility.