A bed in which all the world slept badly

The title of this post can be found in Geoff Dyers book, The On Going Moment. It's a great book, one I've started reading again. I've reached the part about beds and thought I'd use the quote of John Szarkowski
for this post and provide a picture (two) of a certain bed

Now this bed, well this bed I'm sure has gone and only exists in this picture and in memory. It's not a bed you could easily forget let alone sleep in. But somebody did and for quite a while. The picture was taken 2005 when I really had just started out in photography (I'm very new to it) and knew nothing of its history or practice. Yet I did feel the picture was important, the room was pretty much frozen in time before I shot it.


The first person to stay in that bed would leave that room for the last time via those stairs. The second by the window, some 35ft to the ground to their death. That happened fourteen years before these pictures was taken.

I stood there for a while before taking the picture, remembered putting those stickers and posters on the wall and the nights in that bed as a boy. I stuck it out for ten years until I left home at 17. I had done all I could to stay out of that bed and the house for years before then. Once I left home for good it became my mothers bed until she decided to take a different exit to me. I wont blame the bed for that but I'm sure she sleeps better now than she did in that bed.

No pictures were ever taken of boy in that bed or room, he was never photographed in it. But as Dyer said in the last passage of his essay on beds. "There was no need to Photograph him because - as this bed makes plain-he was, in a sense, already gone."


Sean