American Bedroom Reflections on the Nature of Life. Barbara Peacock. Kehrer Verlag New release 2023

Text by Barbara Peacock
Quotes by the portrayed persons Designed by Kehrer Design (Lisa Drechsel) Hardcover, 31,5 x 23 cm
208 pages, 91 color ills.
English
ISBN 978-3-96900-129-5
Euro 48,00 / US$ 58.00

A cultural and anthropological study of Americans in their most private dwelling: the bedroom.

American Bedroom is an unfiltered poetic photographic journey viewing Americans in their most intimate dwelling: the bedroom. The nature of the project is unguarded portraits of individuals, couples, and families that reveal the depth of their character, truth, and spirit. The images are paired with quotes from each subject and are full of subtle details that invite us to contemplate the idiosyncrasies of each enigmatic life. Peacock reminds us that, in an era rife with hot-take, reductionist analyses of the American body politic, her fellow citizens really do contain multitudes.

Introductory quote by Larry Fink:
Barbara Peacock’s American Bedroom photographs are a testimony to emotional innocence playing footsie with the devil. With a subject matter such as this, one could almost instantly go toward lurid, voyeuristic admonitions; she does not. Often her subjects are without clothing, in the bed, frolicking around, neutralizing any conventional identity. What is it within her that so magnetizes her subjects in the bed in front of her, that she as an imposing presence, ‘the photogra- pher’, no longer exists?

From the epilogue by Barbara Peacock:
In the beginning, this project was simply about taking photographs of people. In the end it was about the people, their stories, their lives— and I was the conduit. It began to feel much greater than the sum of its parts and as times goes on, I think it will feel increasingly so. (…) The genesis of American Bedroom began one spring morning when I was looking out of my bedroom window into my garden. When I turned, I saw my husband wrapped up in bed linens, bathed in low amber light, looking like a Renaissance painting. The caveat was his snore mask, which created a dichotomy of the classical and the con- temporary. I chuckled a little. As I sat back in bed with my coffee the concept of “rebirth of naturalism” was spinning around my head. I imagined the scene as a photograph, envisioning where and how I would appear. Then my mind began to consider our bedside tables— covered in books, water, sleep aids, notebooks for midnight thoughts, and coffee rings. (…) Ibelievethebedroomisnotjustaprivateplace,butasacredplace.We build it as a shrine to our lives (even if houseless) and spend nearly one third of our lives in it. It exemplifies our being; it is a place to rest, to love, to comfort, to be, to give life, to restore, to recover, to grieve, to lay sick and to die. The one thing I know for certain is that all lives are im- portant, and everyone has a story to tell. This is not a look at our differences—although there may be many— it is about our likenesses, our loves, our dreams, and all the threads of commonality that connect us as human beings.

Barbara Peacock is a photographer and director living in Portland, Maine. Since having started American Bedroom in 2016, she has won the Getty Editorial Grant, the Women Photograph/Getty Grant, three LensCulture Awards, four Top 50 Critical Mass Awards, and was named one of the Top 100 Photographers in America 2020.