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Why do so many people love these photos of unmade beds?

Why do so many people love these photos of unmade beds?

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Photographer Joe Gerhard's "Morning" and "Shadows & Light" have together been shared on Tumblr some 30,000 times. The artist talks with American Photo about how the photos came to be, his larger project Unmade Beds, and shifting ideas around ownership of information.

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unmade beds (joe gerhard flickr)
unmade beds (joe gerhard flickr)

What is it about these images of an unmade bed that we find so absorbing? In photographer Joe Gerhard’s words, "there is an intimacy to an unmade bed that makes a photograph of a stranger’s bed both immediately familiar and vaguely transgressive." Over the past year, Gerhard’s images "Morning" and "Shadows & Light" have together been shared some 30,000 times on Tumblr, and a recent interview with American Photo Magazine sees the artist answer questions about how the photos came to be, his larger project Unmade Beds, and how he sees shifting ideas around ownership in the age of information excess.

Concerning equipment, Gerhard thinks that the slow deliberation and "awkwardness" imposed by medium and large format film photography lends itself well to his work — "small, quiet" moments when "something mundane is seen vividly, as if for the first time." It’s been said many times, but photography is all about light, and the soft, early morning glow in Gerhard’s images above makes the rumpled covers that much more inviting.