Domestic Landscapes is a long-term project by Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen, begun in southern France in 1996 and completed in its core form in 2011, documenting people in older homes across Europe and later Japan.
The project examines home as both a physical setting and a record of everyday life. Teunissen is drawn to interiors built before World War II, when daylight shaped the placement of windows, rooms, and household routines. His search was also personal: the light and atmosphere of these houses recalled the childhood home in Ruurlo that was demolished when he was eight. Across approximately 790 photographs made in 27 countries, the work considers how local building traditions, furnishings, work, memory, and family histories become embedded in domestic space. It also registers the pressures placed on such environments by modernization, urban migration, standardized housing, and changing regulatory conditions.
Teunissen generally photographs inhabitants within the rooms they use most, often kitchens or sitting rooms. Figures sit or stand with a direct, composed presence, surrounded by shelves, textiles, religious images, tools, food, wallpaper, and worn architectural surfaces. The rooms are neither treated simply as backgrounds nor reduced to typological specimens; people and objects are brought together as a whole.
Working with a Cambo Wide camera, Schneider Super Angulon lenses, and Kodak 400NC color negative film in 4-by-5 and 2-by-5 formats, he made slow, carefully positioned exposures without flash or studio lighting. The resulting chemical C-prints preserve the tonal shifts between illuminated faces, dark corners, wood, plaster, and fabric.
Published and exhibited internationally, Domestic Landscapes helped establish Teunissen's reputation beyond commercial photography. Presentations at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, The Photographers' Gallery in London, and Aperture Gallery in New York brought the project to broad audiences, while awards including PDN's Annual Photography Award and the Prix de la Photographie Paris followed its monograph publication.
