The oddly mesmeric art of hotel carpeting
Statements of purpose don’t get much more succinct than this one on Dallas-based pilot/photographer Bill Young’s Instagram: “I travel for a living. Stay in a lot of hotels. See a lot of carpet”.
And with that compact manifesto, Young introduces his collection of photos of hotel carpeting. I’d imagine this could be done just as well with hospitals, houses of worship, family-style restaurants…but we’re in hotels for this one.
“It’s probably to hide dirt, but they always caught my eye,” Young later told ABC News. “Half the time, I’m walking around jetlagged, and you look down and it’s like, ‘What is this pyramid thing with these stripes coming off it?’ They always drew my eye as being crazy. You rarely see just a regular carpet you’d see in a house.”
“It’s crazy. I still can’t believe it,” Young said of his growing social media account. “This is my 30 minutes of fame. It’s a fun thing. I don’t see this being a big life-changing event, but I feel like I have pressure to produce. I’ve got to create some more content. I was actually a little stressed because I’m not on a trip right now, but I have a trip next week, so get ready.”
Young didn’t rest on his 15 minutes of fame, though; he put in the work. The world of social media moves fast, and “viral” sensations soon slip away. To put something more tangible in place, the photographer pulled everything together in a coffee table book for Mini Hoxton Press.
The book comes with the foreword: “When a pilot’s daughter tweeted saying that all she wanted for Christmas was for her dad’s Instagram account of hotel carpets to go viral, she didn’t expect it to happen overnight. Hundreds of thousands of people now share Bill’s love of the fascinating, wacky and sometimes ‘challenging’ designs of the hotel carpets he sees around the world. This pocket-sized book documents the weird and wonderful patterns we tend to ignore on our travels and is accompanied by the photographer’s tongue-in-cheek commentary”.
Taken as individual images, it’s pretty amazing how some of them reflect the visual rhythms found in the works of abstract expressionists like Robert Motherwell or Brice Marden. Of course, some of them are just utterly craptacular, but I’ll leave the individual aesthetic judgments to you.
You can view Young’s Instagram here, and view a bit more of his work below.
