Patrick Cates’ hobby is krabattophily, which a fancy, made-up term for outdoor mattress photography. As he explains it over on Hilobrow, the origin of his obsession was innocent enough: “Before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in London for over three decades. And it was only in my last few months there that I noticed my first discarded mattress. Crawling its way to the gutter from a doorway in hedonistic Shoreditch, and surrounded by the morning-after detritus of drunkenly dropped fast food, this quasi-tartan beast demanded some photographic attention without explaining exactly why I obliged.”

View a larger image of that first mattress, along with a few others that have caught his fancy, after the jump.

Mattress and Chips – The original

Bunk Man – “A triptych of colour clash and pattern mismatch that engages the eye and then torments it.”

The End of the Cretaceous Era – “The rubbish will submerge the plain and the dinosaurs will become fossils.”

Door Sandwich – “A Duchampian almost-readymade that feels gravid with accidental meaning: arrivals, departures, sleep, death.”

A Tribute to Louise Bourgeois – “An abandoned lover wraps herself with a blanket in an act of post-coital shame.”