Photobook Review: Responds Quickly, Friendly by Marens van Leunen

‘Responds Quickly, Friendly’ is an inventory of the belongings of the photographer’s father. It’s a creative inventory, the lamps, coffee pots, and chairs that he owned photographed as sculptural forms that constitute a domestic uncanny.

When a photographer’s parents die, move house, or are compelled to declutter their domestic space, the photographer’s response is inevitable; it is an opportunity to photograph.

I’m doing it right now with my mum’s house. She’s moved into a care home, and as the house is prepared for sale, her old shoes, clothes, and books have been packed to go to the charity shop. I photographed it along with the empty spaces where furniture once stood.

Ton Grote, in his beautiful photobook, Eindhovenseweg 56, has taken a more formal approach to documenting the belongings his father accumulated over many decades, photographing each item individually so it becomes a gentle, loving, and razor-sharp archaeology of household consumption.

Marens van Leunen takes a different tack in her book, creating a playful study of her father’s goods that is both odd and affectionate. He’s moving out of the apartment that was her childhood home and she wants to photograph it.

And that’s what she does. She clamps the many Anglepoise lamps that he has scattered around the apartment onto the bannister and photographs them in a haphazard sequence of angles, the cables dangling towards the hardwood floor, one of them stretching inconveniently across the stairway into a waist-level electrical socket.

A more intricate assemblage comes with three chairs balanced on top of each other, the highest one resting feet-to-feet on the middle one. And there in the corner of the picture the shade of one of those Anglepoise lamps makes itself known.

It seems to be a large apartment, and amidst the low-contrast black-and-white images of chairs, cushions, teacups, and tuning forks we see the legs of her father as he disappears up a ladder into the attic, or his hands as he gets to grips with a table or oversized light fitting he is about to sell.

It’s a playful book but one that hints both at not throwing things away out of principle, and being aware of the value of all things. Van Leunen’s dad has more remote controls, bottle crates, and vacuum cleaners, and old tuning forks than the average household, and this, we learn, might be something of a hobby for him.

This idea is reinforced through scans of old notebooks detailing her father’s transactions on the Dutch Marktplaats.nl website. Pages and pages of notebooks show his bought (incoop) and sold (verkoop) transactions. He did pretty well on some things, to be fair (he bought a MacBook for 300 euros and sold it for 800; 6 coffee stools that he bought for 95 euros went for 225), but not so well on others. It looks like a lot of work for a buying and selling side-gig, and you get the feeling that the work of photographing his goods, packing them, delivering them, and recording his efforts gave him a distinct pleasure in life.

Van Leunen’s dad is a good seller. We see that in his reviews from the Marktplaats.nl website. He has 113 reviews (112 five-star and 1 one-star), and his top good points are the ‘Responds quickly’ and ‘friendly’ in the title.

Go to the inside cover and we see his functional sale pictures. There are the Anglepoise lamps, the sets of chairs, the headphones. They are in colour, and they have a blank descriptiveness to them.

Flick the page on and you move from the functionality of the father’s photographer to the creativity of the daughter’s: a pile of chairs built into a pyramid on a hard-lit double bed. As with all her images, it’s an assemblage that has a life of its own, that revels in its sculptural oddness.

These are more than just chairs, these are a cluster of chairs; these are more than just books, they are a tower of books; these are more than just cushions, they are a wall of cushions; the individual becoming something more as they are piled, grouped, and squashed together. She makes order out of chaos just as her father makes order out of chaos. In both cases, however, all this stacking and ordering and arranging gives these household objects a life of their own. The chaos one feels is there, just below the surface.

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‘Responds Quickly, Friendly’ by Marens van Leunen is published by Void.

Photograph: Marens van Leunen
Edit, Design: João Linneu, Myrto Steirou
Printing: Jelgavas tipogrāfija
Binding: Jelgavas tipogrāfija
Language: English
Font: BDO Grotesk by Deni Anggara

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Marens van Leunen (1994, Netherlands) is a Dutch visual artist and photographer based in Antwerp. She explores the relationships between people, their domestic environments, and the objects that inhabit them, often starting from her own surroundings. Through observation and staging, she questions how everyday spaces and belongings reflect, shape, or extend our identities. She was selected for .tiff 2024, emerging Belgian photography, by FOMU Antwerp, leading to exhibitions at FOMU and De Brakke Grond. She was also selected for FUTURES, the European platform for photography.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His photography focuses on domestic environments and family, and includes his books Sofa Portraits, All Quiet on the Home Front, Sofa Portraits, and German Family Album, projects where the conflicting narratives of family, cultural, and political histories overlap with ideas of memory, the environment, and fragile documentary. He teaches on the Falmouth University Photography MA and runs independent online workshops linking contemporary photography to global, historical, and theoretical perspectives. Follow him on Instagram