Stunning photos show how different young people's bedrooms look in 22 countries
Thackwray has spent the last six years putting together his My Room Project, bit by bit, bedroom by bedroom.
He started at home, in France, but ended up photographing bedrooms in 55 different countries.
According to him, bedrooms might be an overstatement...
"Where people sleep” is more accurate, according to Thackwray.
Each photo is captioned with the subject's name, age and occupation, as well as a number that correlates to the order Thackwray shot it in.
He focused on people between the ages of 18 and 30.
And tried to split his subjects evenly by gender.
He liked to document both the rich and poor, the modern and the traditional, and the rural and the urban in any given place.
Interested in documenting “the inequalities impacting humankind,” he asked photo subjects about their life and the problems they have to face.
He'd chat with people about everything from politics to relationships.
Finding people willing to let them document their most private spaces wasn’t easy.
“Convincing people took 95% of the time — my shooting time was little compared to it,” he said.
He mostly used social media and local NGOs to find people...
However, he sometimes just approached people on the street, though he said that was rare, “because it can be too dangerous in some communities."
One thing he learned through this project is “that the world is unfair.”
He adds that “inequalities and ignorance are the main scourges of humanity.”
He also believes that people often confuse poverty with violence, and comfort with happiness, but that these things are mutually exclusive.
“I've seen more smiles in poor countries, and much more depression in developed countries," he said.
“I was also impressed by spiritually in India, hospitality in Russia, and the craziness of the Japanese lifestyle."
Despite many differences, one thing that was the same was that almost everyone had access to the Internet and social media, “from Saudi young women to farmers in the African bush," he said. "This is definitely the connected generation."
My Room will be published as a book later this year, titled “My Room, portrait of a generation.”
Pre-order a copy here.
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