Portraits of Absence

Photo: Joe Gerhard (motelrodeo)/Flickr

Finally! An undisputably solid excuse not to make my bed in the morning that not even my wife can deny: it's art. Seriously.

Photographer Joe Gerhard said this about his photography series "Unmade Bed":

There is an intimacy to an unmade bed that makes a photograph of a stranger's bed both immediately familiar and vaguely transgressive. This project began with a photograph of my own bed, taken just after my wife and I climbed out of it one morning, which I titled "Self-Portrait". It has always seemed to me that there is something evocative about an unmade bed; something of a portrait by proxy of the person who had just slept there. I see in these images palimpsests of the sleepers.

These photographs are, in a sense, portraits of absence.