Not everyone is aware that they are posing for British photographer Paul Trevor.
Case in point: When Trevor visited the Yucatan Peninsula in the 1980s, he booked a room at a hotel where guests had to bring their own hammocks.
“You went into the bedroom and there were just two hooks,” he recalls. “So you needed to provide your own, otherwise you slept on the floor.”
He headed out to buy one, but found the owner of the local shop asleep on the job.
Careful not to disturb the slumbering shopkeeper, Trevor quietly photographed the scene and left. He returned to buy a hammock later.
This photo joined a growing collection he had been putting together since he started out in photography a decade earlier. In an ongoing project, brought together in his new book “Sleeper”, he photographs people — and sometimes animals — napping.
“It’s something I’m drawn to: there’s something very serene, very peaceful about it,” he says.
Who doesn’t sleep?
“These pictures observe nappers all over the world — we can all relate to it, it’s such a universal thing,” he says in a story in the Guardian. “We’re dealing with people of different age groups, races, classes. It’s an interesting way of creating a visual narrative that deals with these things in an implicit way.”
And, he adds, naps are healthy: “I’m on my way to Barcelona at the moment, and in Spain people have a siesta and they live longer than all the other people in Europe.”
The man in the shop never saw the picture of himself having a snooze.
“I think if he saw it he would have a bit of a chuckle,” Trevor says. “He’d probably complain that it was supposed to be his siesta and they forced him into the shop, so he decided to have his siesta anyway.”
Since picking up the camera at the age of 25, Trevor’s
photographs have been widely published in books, magazines,
films and television.
Abandoning his job as an accountant, he applied to picture-
making the rapid hand-eye coordination he acquired as a
teenage table tennis ace, according to his biography. Trevor first exhibited internationally in 1978.
Source: Guardian, paultrevor.com
