People who willingly drop out of society and go live in the wilderness on their own are generally the chillest of the chill (except when they’re really grumpy old men with shotguns yelling ‘get off of my land’) and these portraits taken by French photographer Antoine Bruy generally capture the essence of this.

Bruy spent three years hitchhiking across Europe from 2010-13 in order to capture these images and found many people who had willingly given up on civilisation in the remote wilderness. Here are a bunch of pictures of them – amazingly many of them were teachers/academics that had willingly given it all up for the simple life they now lead in the mountains.