Mick Hartley

Pictures of old abandoned shops and businesses, from French photographer Thibaut Derien:

There's a book – J'habite une ville fantôme (I live in a ghost town) – and a website.

The conceit is that, tired of city life but unwilling to go for the full rural, he now lives in this ghost town:

A city without people or cars, without noise or commotion, peaceful as the countryside, calming as the sea.

Today I walk silently in the streets made just for me …

At first I asked myself some questions: what had happened here and what had become of the population? Urban migration, natural disaster, ecological disaster, it is not important. I kill time … imagining all these past lives behind the closed shutters, these iron curtains drawn.”

But then he is French.