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Sleeping Beauty

One of the subtle advantages of travelling far and wide is not only that you get to see  places, but also that you can ultimately affirm your friendships. As there’s no better way to truly know someone than when you travel with them. Whether you find yourself in trains, crammed buses, tents, airports or guesthouses, you can always catch your companions unaware, especially if they are sleeping.

There is this state of dainty vulnerability in all those who abandon themselves to sleeping, no matter whether they do so for pleasure, because they have to or out of sheer fatigue. And there is also this slightly kinky temptation, of some voyeuristic sort, to take their shots in such circumstances. For the watchful, clear-minded one always seems to have the upper hand upon the dreamer. Sleeping Beauty is, actually, a victim. (Let us quote from the fairy tale in question: “The princess was as beautiful as daylight, for slumber had bereft her not of the lively hues her face spread. Neither her blushful cheeks, nor her rosy lips had withered. It was only that her eyes were closed.”

I, for one, experience a guilty pleasure whenever I photograph my children, my friends or my wife while they are asleep, but I can’t help it, and in my thoughts I ask them for forgiveness. On the other hand, I know for sure that many of my photographer friends have taken their own shots of me sleeping in various postures, which, at least to some extent, grants me absolution.

I have a vast collection of pictures with my friends sleeping, but the challenge to trace these images back somewhere in my archive is unacceptable as the chances to find them are next to naught from the very beginning. This is because my archive is so mysteriously organised that I always come across whatever I don’t need rather than what I do.

Somehow, inexplicably, I have managed, though, to put together a small series with my hermano Cosmin Bumbuț sleeping here and  there in Havana, Playa Larga and Caracas. It’s fairly iconic of how things are when it comes to “fellow travelers sleeping”.

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