HABITAT

A home is more than a house. It is the place where you close the door behind you and leave the world outside, where everything has its settled place and your hand finds the light switch in the dark. HABITAT visits these places long after the last door fell shut.

The rooms have lost their warmth, though not their memory. An armchair still stands where someone left it, a pattern on the wall speaks of taste and of its decade, light falls through windows that nobody opens any more. A great deal has been left behind, and every object asks the same question: why was it not taken along? Sometimes the answer is haste, sometimes grief, most often it stays open.

Decay erases nothing, it uncovers. It strips the rooms of the incidental business of daily life and leaves what they were at heart: protection, refuge, a promise of permanence that no home can keep. What was shelter becomes silence, and in that silence the presence of people is often easier to feel than in any inhabited room.

These photographs come about slowly. You enter a stranger's home like a guest who has arrived too late, you walk quietly, move nothing, wait for the light. Respect for the people who lived here is part of the work.

HABITAT is a bow to the private. To the rooms where people lived and quarrelled and loved and waited, rooms that have become time capsules, irreplaceable, impossible to make again and close to us for exactly that reason.