Mick Hartley

Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen takes photographs of Domestic Landscapes – people in their homes – using only natural light.

He’s visited most of Western Europe, plus Bulgaria (above), and Japan, recording what he believes to be a disappearing way of life.

From an article in IHT last year:

A commercial photographer whose work for companies like G Star Jeans veers toward the cool and kinetic, Teunissen came upon his first interior in “Domestic Landscapes” by accident, as he cycled through the hamlet of Castelnau in southwestern France.

There he found his way to the home of a white-haired woman who sat at a wooden table, its top painted in brown and white checks. Behind her a deer head was mounted above a stone fireplace adorned with a short toile curtain. Shelves of bottles and painted dishware hung beneath a heavy beamed ceiling.

“I was immediately bewitched by the atmosphere,” he said.’

Almost a year later, on an assignment to capture what he called a “Sunday afternoon feeling” for a gin advertisement, he took a similar image some 1,100 kilometers away in his birthplace of Ruurlo.

“It started occurring to me that there had been an atmospheric similarity,” he said. “The places in my photographs had something in common that had to do with some kind of architectural consistency.

“But it was not just about nice old places that gave me a nostalgic feeling and reminded me of my old family home,” he continued. “It also became clear that this had to do with a way of living, a way of building, a way of using the house, that I understood was disappearing.”

He began to investigate remote regions of Europe where actual daylight had been an important aspect in the way people lived and used a house in the years before electricity.

(Via Metafilter)