Domestic Landscapes Artist's Statement

Essentially, Domestic Landscapes is my quest for particular interior environments that were so familiar to me when I was a little boy. Though these still exist in this world, I am sure that they are fated to disappear, and before they have gone forever, I would like to capture them for later generations.

History teaches us that most cultural transformations occur due to economics, and rarely for emotional or social reasons. The same applies to this vanishing domestic architecture and its associated ways of life. A centralized economy deeply affects our consciousness, and literally prescribes the way we live our lives. For decades urbanization and globalization have molded our reality and determined our future. In every country I visited for this project, I saw the same effects: a depopulated countryside and land cultivated for hundreds of years now lying fallow. Many villages have lost their local facilities, so remaining inhabitants have to do their shopping in impersonal and alienating suburban malls. While every community used to have a school, now barely one school can be kept open for all the children living within a thirty-mile radius. Almost every farm is abandoned, and complete cultures have been lost. This situation can only increase social poverty and disruption. My travels made me face the facts: the people I portray are an endangered species.

The homes pictured in this archive were almost all built before the use of electric light, and therefore still have the atmosphere they had when they were originally made. The windows, as the only natural source of lighting, are proportioned in relation to the size of a room and create the distinctive atmosphere that the Dutch masters captured so well in their paintings.

Domestic Landscapes is also about identity and originality. Every area of the world has its own distinctive culture, recognizable through its customs, language, cuisine, and other traditions. The inhabitants of the houses I find and photograph still have a sense of the importance of time, and the value of the daily and yearly cycles of life. But their houses and ways of living are fading out of our societies, forever, together with their knowledge.

So perhaps you can say that Domestic Landscapes is a parallel story about atmosphere and light on the one side, and authenticity and originality on the other. Inevitably, the story is also about me, as I became more and more myself during a long journey through a world that confronted me but was not mine. I simply have to make these photographs. There is no way I can, or want to, resist the need to do so.

—BERT TEUNISSEN, 2006