Hello,
My name is Ton Grote and I work as an HR advisor in a hospital. In addition to my work, I am an enthusiastic photographer and fanatic collector of photo books. For me, recording is a form of preservation. Capturing in photos gives me a lot of energy.
Why this book?
In recent years I have worked hard on a photo book about my parental home at Eindhovenseweg 56. The house where my parents have lived since 1969, the house of which I have a warm memory.
My mother passed away 14 years ago. My father was left alone in the big house. Several years after my mother’s death, he started cleaning up things in this house. That was the signal for me to start photographing the house from the inside. At first they were interior photos until I realized that this interior consisted for me of a large number of valuable objects, objects that I grew up with, that I have held in my hand, of which I know how they feel, how they smell. I took over 5,000 photos of everything my parents owned, capturing the traces of an existence, of a life that stretched from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.
Designer Jeremy Jansen
Making a book of my photo work has been a long-cherished wish. As a great enthusiast and collector of photo books, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to turn this image archive into a photo book myself. I was looking for a designer. Someone with a different view of all those objects, someone who makes a new whole from all those individual photos and ended up with the designer Jeremy Jansen. In the book “Eindhovenseweg 56”,Jeremy designed my registrations of objects from my parental home in such a way that they are more than my personal memories; they are images from a bygone era.
A wonderful book for you
Through Jeremy’s selection, arrangement and merging of my photos, a different, new reality has emerged in which – as a viewer – you can spend time concentrated on seemingly trivial, but on closer inspection valuable things. And suddenly the every day turns out to be special, the past approaches. This makes the book a personal visual story for you as well
If you would like to contact me and/or know more about the book, please email teungro@hotmail.com
