Curiously Addictive Photos of Unmade Beds

By Judy Berman

March 14, 2012

To paraphrase Tolstoy in a way that we’re sure he wouldn’t appreciate, properly made beds are all alike — serene, organized, maybe even a bit boring. But every unmade bed is a unique mystery, just waiting for us to draw our own salacious conclusions. That must be why Joseph Gerhard’s black-and-white photo series Unmade Beds is so unexpectedly addictive. While some of the disheveled beds are situated amid rooms cluttered with books and musical instruments, others are the only untidy pieces in otherwise immaculate spaces, and all of them invite us to create a mental picture of their inhabitants. “There is an intimacy to an unmade bed that makes a photograph both immediately familiar and vaguely transgressive,” Gerhard writes, explaining that he sees each of these images as a “portrait by proxy of the person who has just slept there.” Click through for a selection of pictures from the series, and visit Gerhard’s website to see more of his work.