Gallery: Powerful Portraits of People Living Off the Grid
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Scrublands is photographer Antoine Bruy’s look at people around Europe (and soon beyond) who have unplugged from the trappings of city life.
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The portraits in Scrublands show farmers, homesteaders, herders, who seem at once weary and peaceful set against beautiful landscapes and environments largely of their own making.
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The farmers and homesteaders in the series were found mostly in remote mountain ranges, like the Carpathians and the Swiss Alps.
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“I’m trying to meet people who somehow are very critical about our society, who have been living in our society and decided to leave it and live another way, closer to nature and to learn how to collaborate or to use nature to be able to live,” Bruy says.
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The landscapes function as their own character in the series, either as an adversary or a friend to the people trying to survive in the wilderness.
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Bruy put together images from the roughly 15 encampments he visited into a single visual narrative, making it seem the photos all came from the same place.
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“I think if I’m showing these pictures to someone living in \[poverty\], they’ll probably say that these guys are pretty crazy,” Bruy says. “it could be seen as they are going back to the stone age or something.”
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While the photos include images of wisened farmers and community builders, many of their subjects had no experience in living a self-supporting lifestyle prior to setting out on their own.
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The photographer was introduced to these alternative ways of living when he was 19, hitchhiking from the north of France to the south of Morocco on a photo trip.
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The connections Bruy made in his travels, including through Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms during a trip through Australia, provided a starting point for finding subjects of the series.
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Despite forgoing electricity, plumbing, and other amenities, it often takes resources to establish the lifestyles presented in Scrublands---this is an exercise that isn’t available to everyone.
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The use of found materials shows how resourceful his subjects are at carving out a comfortable life far from home.
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Part of the reason Bruy wants to extend the trip to the US---particularly places in New Mexico---is the influence that he says stories from the US have had on the European homesteaders he met.
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Bruy mentions the idealism of the American Hippies of the 1970s, but notes a difference in the way young people today are pursuing alternative ways of life:
