Inhabitat:

Photographer Menno Aden’s awesome Room Portraits capture small-space living like no other. Aden first got his start photographing the rooms of friends in Berlin — a city known for modest living, cheap rent, and often very tiny apartments. Inspired by the lives and sparse belongings of his fellow artists, he started the series as an extension of portraiture. With a bird’s eye view, Aden’s photographs capture the personality and essence of the small space dwellers, without ever showing their faces.

Only aggressive social engineering can transform the way our feelings are presently structured—our feelings for yards, rooms, kitchens, space to ourselves, distance from others. Because feelings are images, changing feelings is a matter of changing images. Because the majority of our images of ideal domestic life lead to the farm house (I have even seen urban homes with pantries), we have bad feelings for the kind of domesticity that is sustainable and achievable—living in small and crowded places. By social engineering, these feelings can be changed. By social engineering, we can find ways to reduce our exploitation of nature/space, and increase our exploitation of the greatest gift evolution has provided us—our pronounced and profound sociality.