In 2007, the death of Ton Grote’s mother left his father alone in the house on Eindhovenseweg 56 where the couple had lived since 1969 and where Grote and his siblings grew up. When his father began to clear the rooms, Grote started photographing the loose things his parents had kept: teapots, old cameras, power strips, drinking glasses, a worn football. What began as a household inventory became an archive of more than five thousand images.

The Dutch photographer treats the object as a unit of memory. The book gathers what his parents treasured and used, item by item, and lets the accumulation carry the meaning rather than a single decisive picture. The publisher’s own phrase for this method is Spurensicherung, the securing of traces, applied here to real and imagined events alike. Grote’s project is at once an homage to his parents’ life and a broader archaeology of recent domestic history, moving between dream and reality, and leaving room for viewers to recognize their own memories and lost objects in his.

The book is designed and edited by Jeremy Jansen, with Kimberley ter Heerdt as design assistant, and published by The Eriskay Connection in 2021. The wrap-around softcover with linen cap is a slim, tall object at 115 by 220 millimeters, yet it runs to 336 pages, a proportion that suits a catalogue of many small things. Jeremy Jansen’s dual role as editor and designer means the book’s sequencing and its physical form were considered together.

For a collector, the work earns its place through the coherence of that method. It crosses the intimacy of a family archive with the tools of documentary cataloguing, and it does so in a publication that handles its mass of material with care. It is a book about how ordinary objects hold a life, and about what photography can preserve when a house is emptied.