‘I don’t have that many deep thoughts; most of the time I just muddle along,’ photographer Taco Anema once said in a radio interview. In this seemingly nonchalant fashion he recorded the lives of a hundred households or families, making portraits of people living together in one house. In like manner, designers Karin van den Brandt and Alex Clay, who together are Lesley Moore, did little more than present these photos in alphabetical order, providing them with a short quotation by way of elucidation and introduction. So it is that Anema’s sympathetic project has been given a book of great simplicity and lack of pretension. The photographs are supported by a brief introduction, a short essay and a series of statistics. From the statistics, which not every member of the panel considered an interesting addition, it seems that numbers of families and marriages have fallen, while the photos show that the composition of households has also changed. Even so, it is all very Dutch and recognizable.
The cover failed to meet with universal approbation, but the project and the way in which it is presented did.