Total Strangers Let This Photographer Crash for a Night in Their Homes
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Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter 
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter SIMILAR GALLERIES
Bieke Depoorter has an unorthodox way of working: The photographer has been wandering cities in Russia, the US and Egypt asking strangers if she can spend the night in their home.
Surprisingly, many of them say yes.
The results are stunning. The Belgian photographer—an associate member of Magnum Photos—makes touching and intimate photos that provide a rare peek into the every day lives of people around the world. It is remarkable how much people open up to her in just 24 hours or less. One photo shows a couple embracing in bed, for example, while another reveals a suicide letter a woman had written but kept hidden from her husband.
“I think part of people letting me in has to do with the fact that they know I’m going away next day,” says Depoorter, 28. “It’s sometimes a lot easier to share personal things if you know you’ll never see this person again.”
Bieke Depoorter photographs inside people’s homes for just one night.
She’s already published a selection of her photos from Russia in Ou Menya, and her work from the US appears in I am About to Call It a Day. Both are full of quiet moments—a family watching television, children playing in their room—that reveal more about her subjects than a carefully composed portrait or a “big moment shot” ever could.
Because she’s asking to be invited into a stranger’s inner life, Depoorter says she’s polite in her approach and respectful of her subjects. She’s interested in building a relationship, however brief, and learning about the people she’s staying with. She feels photography must serve that end. If she finds herself trying to make a good picture instead of experiencing and embracing the moment, she stops.
“I’m with these people as a person, not a photographer,” she says. “I want to be interested for real. I don’t want to see them as a subject.”
Most of her photos are taken in the evening because she’s found people open up as the sun goes down. She’s found Americans more accepting of her idea at first than Russians or Egyptians, but once inside their homes she’s found everyone welcoming.
Depoorter has been shooting in the US since 2010. She’s made eight trips, each lasting a few weeks. When she started, she’d fly into a major city like Dallas and hitchhike. She explored the South early on, then made Seattle a base camp of sorts. During one trip, she drove from Seattle to New York. Another took her from Seattle to LA, and she also drove to Denver. She spent a lot of time in the mountains because she’s drawn to that environment, and many of her landscape photos appear in the book as well.
When driving, Depoorter parks the car and walks around until she finds someone willing to invite her in. It was tougher in Russia because she didn’t speak the language; she carried a note, written by a friend, explaining what she was doing. She’s now working in Egypt, where a translator is helping her out.
Her gorgeous photos stand on their own, with no captions or other info. Although her earlier work had something of a documentary approach, she’s since adopted a more cinematic quality here in the United States. Each photo captures a moment and is not meant to be a factual statement about a place or the people in it.
“I’m not trying to tell the world, ‘America is like this’,” she says. “For me the photos in the United States are more in between reality and fiction.”