For those who grew up in the 2010s browsing through Tumblr and YouTube, writer, poet and influencer Orion Carlotto has been on teenage girls’ Pinterest mood boards for years. 

Filled with her poetry and intimate images of her quotidian life, her first book Film for Her, published in 2020, was to TikTok teenagers what Alexa Chung’s ‘It’ was to Tumblr kids. Now, released next week her latest zine is dedicated to the most sacred and restful space, our beds. Titled Bed’s I’ve Slept In the zine documents beds from her hometown in Georgia to a bed in the famous Chateau Marmont.

While the project is a photobook made up of predominantly images she took, punctuated with images she sourced over the years, Carlotto rejects the title of photographer. “Film For Her also kind of started accidentally. The photos came first and poetry followed after. So calling myself a photographer feels like blasphemy. I just love the relationship I have with my film camera, it doesn’t feel forced and I don’t feel pressure with it.”

Alongside her images, Carlotto included pictures sourced from crates of vintage images from flea markets. One image depicts a young girl kneeling down and praying by her bedside, while another shows two deers sitting on a bed staring deadpan into the camera. “I started collecting photographs of people throughout the years in their beds,” she explained. “I have this catalogue of these incredible photos and I needed to put something in the zine and have them be included in some way.”

Alongside the zine, she curated a two-day show in Los Angeles named after Virginia Woolf’s famous extended essay A Room of One’s Own. Emulating the ambience of a bedroom, the show includes works from Meghann Stephenson, Marguerite Chapel and a special piece she brought from Joan Didion’s estate sale.

Below she told us about the zine, curating an exhibition and getting her hands on Joan Didion’s quilt.

Could you tell us a bit about the zine, how did it come about? How long have you been working on it?

Orion Carlotto: So there are two answers to this. Unintentionally, for years and intentionally for the past year and a half. Last summer I was in Europe with my best friend and we had just landed in Portugal. We were so jet-lagged and I was like, I guess this is just a time we’re going to be on our phones, essentially. I pulled up my computer and I’m just looking at all of my photos. I realised how many of my photos consisted of beds and bedrooms. I love taking photos of a bed I’m about to sleep in for no reason other than the fact that it’s a memory of time and place.

I brought it up to Enya and said I should start an Instagram account or something for it, to cleanse them off my plate. She gave me the idea to put it all in one place just in a more tangible form. I don’t know why I didn’t think about that but I guess I thought why would anyone care about that? It was crazy going through the photos and seeing that I had pictures of myself in my own personal bed at 16 years old.

I saw the Polaroids on the first page from age 16 to 27. What was looking back through a decade’s worth of images of your room?

Orion Carlotto: It was crazy as I remember the day those photos were taken, for no reason other than just wanting to document myself in my room. It felt like an integral part of this project was stumbling across those pictures and it was really sweet to kind of see how the room has evolved even though you only got so little of it. 

Writing can sometimes be more instantaneous than film photography. You’re confronted with your thoughts on a page as you write them, but film photography needs to be developed and takes more time. How do you find the processes compare? Does it feel more freeing to you, or the opposite because you do not know what you’ll get when the images are developed?

Orion Carlotto: I think it is freeing. What makes it so exciting still to this day, is that you don’t know what it’s going to look like and you have this vision of what it might look like but almost every single time, that’s never the case. Funnily, writing, while it is instant and it’s a thought immediately going to paper, I think there’s this relationship I have to it where there are moments that I want to write about but I feel like I need more time to experience something or find the right words. So there is a patience I kind of have with writing and it’s something I am not happy with. I wish I could just feel confident that I could write the best version of whatever it may be at this moment.

I spotted one of the images in New York but where were all the images taken?

Orion Carlotto: They span from New York to my home here in Los Angeles, Paris, rural Tennessee, Georgia. A lot of the prettier beds you’ll see will be in Spain and a Portuguese small town that my best friend and I go to. There’s one from a little dorm in Cambridge University. There are also few in Los Angeles actually, not just my home. We have the Chateau Marmont, a classic. They just kind of follow wherever I go and I don’t really go that many places.

What made you decide to create an exhibition, where did that idea come from?

Orion Carlotto: I just feel like the relationship we have with our bedroom is not just one’s own experience. Everyone I feel has a relationship with their bedroom. When doing the gallery I knew that it wasn’t my intention to showcase my art that’s in the book, so there will be no photos on the wall. It’s like I said, being a ‘photographer’ feels blasphemous for me. I didn’t want to frame my photographs and have everyone come in and look at them. But I did want to create a world of the bedroom. There are so many references to a bedroom that it felt like I needed to do something.

I titled it A Room of One’s Own because there’s a famous quote from it: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ I put so many incredible things in one space and incredible artists who are just insane at what they do. Having access to so many moments and various feelings of a bedroom feels really exciting. it’s just more so a world of sensibilities and mementos, and a walk down history lane of people who are no longer with us in their bedrooms and how they treat that relationship. I do think it is our most sacred relationship, how we sleep determines how we show up the next day for other people. A bedroom, in its own way, is like a scrapbook of our sensibilities the sacred parts of ourselves.

In the list of contributions there is a mention of Joan Didion’s estate, how did that come about?

Orion Carlotto: So this all goes back to her estate sale. When she passed (RIP love you girl) she had the estate sale of all of her New York belongings. It kind of blew up and was everyone talking it. I felt like I had a fighting chance until The Cut released an article about it. Then it happened and I was on the bidding site watching her glasses sell for over $20,000. I’m watching everything go and I see this beautiful quilt that hung above Quintana Roo’s bed. And if you know, Joan writes about her love for quilts, I did a lot of research on this because I know she’d written about a great-grandmother’s quilt before. I ended up bidding on the quilt and I won the bid. I never told anyone so nobody knows that this is something that I own. 

I felt like insane. I cried and then I looked at the price and was like what did I actually just do right now? But I viewed it as a piece of art and this piece of history that is so special. She’s this enigma who everyone has grown to love especially in the past five years. So having this piece of Joan it’s in my bedroom feels like I shouldn’t just have it. I do feel like people should have more access to seeing the scale of this thing. It’s just massive and so stunning. It was the first thing that I knew that would live in the gallery and it was only fitting that it lived above Quintana’s bed.

What does your dream room look like?

Orion Carlotto: One of my favourites is this film called Cleo from 5 to 7. That bedroom is so good, it has a modern take on something vintage, at a time that we now consider to be vintage. That room has much room to do cartwheels. I want to do cartwheels in my bedroom, I don’t have space for that. Also, I cannot believe in pulling this reference out, but did you ever see Hey Arnold as a kid? Why don’t we talk about his room? He lives in a greenhouse!

What do you people take away from the zine? And from the photobook, like if there was like one thing you could hope they take away from it? What would it be?

Orion Carlotto: This felt like almost this selfish endeavour where it was almost like why does anyone care about what beds I’ve slept in? But I’ve kind of always treated what I do as a visual diary or scrapbook of my life and it almost just feels like I did this thing for myself. I think the one thing I would want people to take away is the documentation of their own lives, I have such a hard time grasping the concept of time passing. It has nothing to do with getting old. I think just like losing moments, and sacred moments feels like I’m being robbed of something. Capturing these times feels like I need it for a version of myself that I haven’t met yet, who’s going to really love and appreciate that I documented this and I just want people to do the same.

Orion’s zine will be available for purchase next week and the exhibition will be open December 9 and 10 from 12-5 pm at 1056 South Fairfax Ave Los Angeles, CA 90019.