A local photographer has launched a book featuring the beds she has slept in for the past seven years, making for a quirky Valentine’s Day gift.

From Long Island to Paris to Birmingham, page after page of Beds reveals made and unmade beds that record a night of sleep in an unfamiliar city.

Barbara Taylor, who lives off Dyke Road in Withdean Ward, is originally from New York, and started studying at the University of Brighton in 2001 where she is now completing her Masters in Photography.

In the introduction to Beds she wrote: “One morning I noticed the shapes the covers made after I had got up and was intrigued how that related to the sleep I had just emerged from.

“ I am interested in the psychological space between sleep and consciousness, and how the change that occurs within that space is recorded by the bedding. That space is where the story lives, and the beds in this collection, even the unslept-in ones, have a story to tell.”

Barbara has lived in Brighton for eleven years and has worked for the university’s Design Archives on 'Designing Britain'. She is now working on the Joint Information Systems Committee's 'Images for Education' project and remarked that a photography book of beds would be a romantic gift for Valentine’s Day.

She said: “The unmade bed carries the memory of what happened before. The crumpled sheets hold the imprints of the passion.”

She also suggested that the smallness of the book invites intimate conversations with the viewer and could make for good reading in bed.

Copies of Beds can be ordered online from Blurb Bookstore at www.blurb.com.

Adele Jarrett-Kerr