There’s a story that the American photographer Imogen Cunningham used to tell about her friend and fellow photographer Dorothea Lange.  The two women were contemporaries but had different styles of photography: Cunningham once said that she “need never photograph ugliness”, while Lange’s style was noted for capturing unvarnished reality, and not just beautiful things.

At one point in her career, Lange taught classes to aspiring photographers, encouraging her students to find the photographic potential in any kind of subject. She would assign her students an exercise to photograph their own home environment as it really was, without tidying it up, etc.

Cunningham found this kind of assignment particularly amusing. So, one day after getting out of bed, she looked around her room and decided to take a photo “for Dorothea.” Now, I don’t know if Dorothea  approved of the final image, since Cunningham actually did arrange the scene just a little, throwing a couple of hair pins onto the bed that wouldn’t have normally been there. But the resulting Unmade Bed photo is considered one of Cunningham’s classic works.

The Unmade Bed, Imogen Cunningham, 1957

Now, a few weeks ago, when I was trying out my new cell phone camera for the first time, I starting taking test photos around the house. When I teach my workshops, I often I give my students an assignment that is similar in concept to Lange’s idea: I tell them to try taking photos in their bathrooms. Given that, you might think that’s the room where I started with my own camera tests.

However, perhaps because I’m currently reading about Dorothea Lange in preparation for a talk I’m giving next month, I decided to start my testing by taking some photos in the bedroom, before I took images in other rooms.  Surprisingly,  when I reviewed  my test shots at the end of the day,  I actually thought that three of my best images had all been taken in the bedroom. And they all featured my unmade bed. Too funny.

Dorothea and Imogen, these are for you. 😉

“LLM’s Unmade Bed” – Photo #1

In Photo #1, there’s an effect that’s been applied to turn the original into black and white (the sheet is light pink in real life), as well as to create a circle blob in the middle. In real life, there was no puffy circle like that in the sheet.

“LLM’s Unmade Bed” – Photo #2

Photo #2: This one has the most extreme effect applied, twisting and reshaping the sheet into reflected geometric pieces. Plus, the original light pink color has been deepened dramatically in this image.

“LLM’s Unmade Bed” – Photo #3

This is the one I like the best: black and white, with a little bit of a soft vignette around the edges. Since I found that as a subject, the unmade bed by itself was lacking a certain something for me in the photos,  I decided to expand the view to the entire room in this view of it. It’s the same thing that perhaps propelled Cunningham to add those hairpins to her photo.