When British photographer Paul Trevor was travelling around the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in the 1980s, he stayed 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 in front of his folded-up hammocks.
Careful not to disturb the slumbering shopkeeper, Paul Trevor quietly photographed the scene and left. (He returned to buy a hammock later.) This photo joined a growing collection he’d 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.
Sleeping is something everyone does. “These pictures observe nappers all over the world – we can all relate to it, it’s such a universal thing,” he says. “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,” Paul 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.”
Sleeper is out now (Cafe Royal, £6)
