A Photographic Gallery of Old Mattresses Al Fresco


Mattress Number One: FREE MATTRESS and PLATE GLASS #2023/5094
Paris, 2023


Gold Hill Mesa Dumped Mattress
Colorado Springs 2019


Big Dog City (flower) Mattress or Simply a Curious Juxtaposition
Paris 2022


Mattress Belonging to An Unknown Cripple Creek Woman
Colorado Springs 2022

Mattress and Curiously, and Perhaps Delightfully-Wrinkled-Sheet
Paris 2019

Alas, the Princess Was Unable to Locate the Pea
Colorado Springs 2025

Off Madison Avenue: Mattress In the Rain
New York City 2024



On Photographing Discarded Mattresses

Generally, people smile or sigh when they see I have photographed yet another water hose. These hundreds of garden hose images, which I have been documenting for decades, are generally lyrical snarls or orderly coils, each hose a visual poem worthy of being illustrated on a greeting card.

The mattress images are quite different. These are not portraits of fresh, new, unslept upon bedding. Each trashed mattress holds countless invisible episodes in an individual human's existence. Chapter upon chapter is written indecipherably. Are these beds really as full of angst as Russian novels? Do they give evidence of love or betrayal? Is this particular stain evidence of loss? A mattress is a canvas written upon with invisible paint.

I photograph those discarded canvasses as curious, failed expressions of human existence, or the human struggle to exist. They are most certainly not blank canvases at all, just subtle and loaded with the viewers associations. It is the viewer whose perceptions are projected upon the soiled and stained mattresses.

Each old mattress is discarded for a reason, generally only known to the would-be-sleeper. Many find these photographed mattresses repugnant and not poetic.

Yet, each mattress tells many tales; the trajectory of a life or at least of the span of time during which this or that person used this bed.

A mattress is more than a bed. It is poetically the composite record, a palimpsest, of an individual life, a self-portrait. Quite possibly a favored pet slept just here or there, as well.

Images of soiled bedding would make terrible birthday cards.







An aside:

There are people who, for sake of a better term: recycle such bedding. I do not make images of them. Even out-of-doors they deserve privacy and respect.

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