Photobook Review: Toos & Tiny by Jaap Scheeren

A 17 x 20 cm monument that you will flip in your hands, Toos & Tiny | My Mother’s Mother and My Father’s Father is a concise ode to legacy, to the bloodlines that have shaped us, and to our lifetime mission of holding fragments of time together.

Toos & Tiny by Jaap Scheeren, published by Fw:Books, is a book that has no correct reading order. You can open it from both ends and turn its pages. Based on where you’ll start from, you’ll either find Tiny – Scheeren’s father’s father – or Toos, his mother’s mother. Separated in two distinct sections of the book, Tiny and Toos meet on the spine, their names heading in two opposite directions. Their path crosses in the middle of the book too, where they meet back to front – a strange encounter. To get from Toos to Tiny, or the other way around, you’ll need to flip the book. A movement that triggers a leap in space and time: you’ll be taken from a house to another, both located in the town of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, while traversing different timelines, from before and after they passed away.

Scheeren’s photographs are playful and performative. Objects are moved around, and scenes are constructed from scratch. The two sections share the same essence, though they seem to speak different languages. “I started working with Grandma Toos in 2007. As my parents moved out of Nijmegen, my dad asked her to keep him updated on the local sports news. She started to send articles over. With them, she included some notes that reported small, ordinary things about her life – the encounter with a burglar, a storm, my uncle’s divorce. At some point, my mom gave all these notes to me. They were really funny and they captured Toos’ essence, her way of thinking about life. I called her and asked if we could reenact the stories she wrote. All the pictures in this section are essentially us playing in and around her house, starting from those notes”, Scheeren explains. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he decided he’d work with Tiny, too. Yet, their relationship was quite different, much more silent and quieter. “I went there and tried to make portraits, but it didn’t really work out. After he passed away, I took three boxes full of his everyday objects. His hairbrush, shaving brush, toiletry bag, slippers, cooking utensils, food, and herbs. Everything that was close to him. I kept them for a couple of years in my studio, until I decided to make still lives using a Polaroid Big Shot camera he owned. I thought this could be a different way to connect with him”.

The two sections come together forcefully, made to communicate within the same object. Toos’ part is energetic, theatrical, and collaborative: she is the subject of almost all the pictures, and an active part in shaping the narrative. Tiny’s pages instead are a silent dialogue constructed from a distance, a performance that cracks time and creates a meeting ground – a place for Scheeren and Tiny to communicate without talking.

The structure of this book reflects on how we all are, in some way, at the crossroads of different people – our parents, our parents’ parents, and those before them. Tiny and Toos will forever be held together in this book, just as they are together in their grandchildren. “My grandmother resembles my mom, while my father, just as Tiny, is a really quiet, not-so-talkative guy. Sometimes I’m a bit more like her, other times I’m a bit more like him. I wanted these two worlds to come together. Eventually, this work is all about looking at where you come from and how you end up being who you are. More than a personal story, it is about these generational lines”.

Yet a personal story is there, emerging from every picture. One that speaks to all of us about the joy of our relationships and the effort they take. About the struggle in understanding how to talk to the people we love, and the excitement of the moment when we think we found a way. About the beauty in creating something new together. About the will to mess with time so that our stories, even the more insignificant ones, can stay, and not dissipate. So that we can keep everything alive: not only the memory of the people we miss, but also the dynamics of our connection. That is to say, the people we become when we are with them.

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Toos & Tiny / My Mother’s Mother and My Father’s Father is published by Fw:Books

17 x 20 cm / 112 pages (56 pages for Toos, 56 pages for Tiny) / hardcover / isbn 978-90-835197-0-8

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Jaap Scheeren (Nijmegen, 1979). Photographer, father of two, lives and works in Amsterdam. In his own works as well as in commissioned work he tries to stay on the narrow path of reliability. He is focussed on the estrangement and pretty environment and its inhabitants. He made at least five publications; The Black Hole (i.c.w. Anouk Kruithof), Oma Toos, a Slovakian fairytale book called 3 Roses, 9 Ravens, 12 Months and together with Hans Gremmen a research into printing named Fake Flowers in Full Colour. His 10 year overview book was suppose to be a website, but turned out as a book titled Jaap Scheeren Cut Shaving. His most recent effort took years because he was too tired to finish anything and perhaps had a midlife crisis he was unaware off. BUT, is a great photonovel titled Flipping The Bird, a tale about a person wanting to reconnect to nature and natures respond to him. Besides this, he worked on commissions for FOAM magazine, NY Times magazine, Wallpaper, The Guardian, Das Magazin and Hyeres photography and fashion festival among too many others.

Camilla Marrese (b.1998) is a photographer and designer based in Italy. Her practice intersects documentary photography, design for publishing and writing, aiming for the expression and visual articulation of complex issues.