Kehrer Verlag is releasing the book American Bedroom by Barbara Peacock.
For seven years, American photographer Barbara Peacock crisscrossed the United States photographing people in the spaces they defined as their bedrooms. The bedroom is an inherently personal space where humans are perhaps at their most vulnerable. Whether a room in a house, a camper, or an outdoor space, Peacock presents a body of work that invites the viewer to consider the stories we each carry, and how those unify us all.
Peacock’s time on the road allowed her to create an expansive set of images that show regardless of geography, people are people, working to survive, and trying to live meaningful lives. American culture is increasingly divisive politically and ideologically, and Peacock notes in her essay for the book that when the physical doors opened, those barriers and divisions were “mysteriously and magically lifted.” She continues, “What appeared was the bare soul of a human life, with a story, and a purity of heart that rose like cream to the top.”
Contributing to the humanistic element prominent throughout this project, quotes from each subject accompany the individual photographs on facing pages and add further nuanced context to the definitions in the faces, their story, physical environment, and personal belongings.
“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. … What is it within her that so magnetizes her subjects in the bed in front of her, that she as an imposing presence, ‘the photographer’, no longer exists” — Larry Fink, photographer
Barbara Peacock : American Bedroom
Kehrer Verlag
Hardcover
12.5 x 1 x 9.3 inches
208 pages
90 photographs
ISBN: 978-3969001295
Price: $56 US
https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/barbara-peacock-american-bedroom-reflections-on-the-nature-of-life
