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.”
Comments (6)
i don’t know what possessed you to begin this photographic journey, but i likes it! :) bizarre and unusual.
I love your shots!
I too have been photographing discarded mattresses for years. I have always found it facinating that so much of our lives are spent on these ‘things’ – so much love, hate, dreams…and then we just toss them away.
I give mine to the Goodwill as long as it’s clean and still useful… ;)
the photography is beautiful, but all i can think of is bedbugs, and how i will walk in the street just to get past one in this infested city.
I thought of the street sofa series when I saw these shots…
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023222&id=1358649285
I hope this is public.
The captions are great. Keep going with this project!
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