The artist who took portraits in sixty bedrooms
Bed Project by Julia Parks documents the experience of making and inhabiting domestic space.
[T]his piece of work began when I was on a photography and printmaking exchange programme in Kyoto, Japan. I was living in a big dormitory with sixty other female students. The people I met would often talk about how it was a big deal to be invited into a Japanese person’s home, because of the private nature of the space. I decided to take a series of portraits of myself in people’s bedrooms and began by asking the female students in my dorm.
The original images I captured were un-uniformed, some of them closely framed and others taken from farther away. In them my outfit changed throughout. It was very much about using the camera to enter into the private space of the bedroom. It was not until I arrived in the UK that I decided to think about the project more seriously. At first, the work was very intuitive and I mainly asked other students. I then asked friends, friends of friends, family members and strangers to participate. I began by putting advertisements up around my university: “Can I take a photo of myself in your bed?”
The nude element arose from a desire to explore the private nature of the bedroom in more depth. The bedroom is the most private space in the home, just as nudity is often confined to the privacy of the home and associated with the bedroom. My relationship to the participants varied – work colleagues, friends, my parents, people who were recommended by other participants, most of whom lived in West Cumbria, where I grew up.
Often the process with each person would be very quick. In total I think I went into around sixty bedrooms. I started this project in my second year of university, and I feel like I have a very different relationship with it now, three years later. When I look back on it now, I see a specific type of confidence and performance for the camera.
Three months into the project, I stopped. In an hour-long meeting, a university tutor told me he felt I was exploiting the people I was photographing for my own sexual gain. I stopped immediately. I felt incredibly embarrassed and ashamed. And I also felt guilty about the photographs I’d taken and found myself wondering if I had indeed taken advantage of people…
Only in the last year have I re-visited the images. I still don’t know exactly how I feel about the tutor’s comments, but I suspect they had an element of misogyny and whether he intended it or not, it did effect my confidence. I often wonder whether this experience has influenced the work I make now. I have, since, featured in my own work and got others to participate within photographs, but it has been in a less private environment, often in the public realm.
I have retreated into the background, behind the camera and I now focus on landscapes and objects, rather than including myself in the frame. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with my self-confidence or feeling like I have to hide behind the camera, I guess some of my interests have just naturally changed over time.
When I started the project I thought it was about entering the private realm and examining the intrusive nature of this act, however upon reflection I don’t feel the photographs are about that. They are more humorous, and about the domestic space and the experience of making them. Because I am there in the same position throughout, the viewer can focus more on the people I’m shooting – on the diverse environments in which they live and the expressions on their faces. There’s an element of performance from me, but also from the participants, some of whom played up to the camera, while some shied away, and others actually dressed up for the photograph.
Finally, I also now recognise the theme of “appropriation”, which I have since forefronted as a device within my work. For many years, I’d seen “artworks” and wanted to re-create them. Gillian Wearing’s Take Your Top Off, 1993, triptych was clearly a big influence on these photographs – although the provenance is different, the formal aspects are similar. I have since re-made works by artist/filmmakers such as Keith Arnatt, John Baldessari, Marie Menken and Karl Blossfeldt.
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