“What happens to lovers while they are sleeping?” photographer Paul Schneggenburger asked as he began his project “The sleep of the beloved.” Using the second room of his two-bedroom Vienna apartment as a studio, he set up black sheets on a mattress, lit by a string of Christmas tree lights. A self-constructed trigger outside the room started the 4×5 camera at midnight for each six-hour exposure and turned it off automatically at 6 a.m., before the sun rose. Schneggenburger, of course, was not in the room during the exposures.

Paul Schneggenburger was curious to find out how people behave when they’re asleep, whether there is any emotion between them.

“I’m fascinated by sleep,” the German-born photographer said. “What’s going on in the body; what’s going on in the mind?” “Is it a nocturnal lovers’ dance - which is not necessarily sensual, but rather a kind of unconscious act of tenderness - or are they turning their backs on each other?” Schneggenburger asks in the gallery’s press release.

Three years ago, he started the project by asking his friends to sleep for a picture, but eventually proposed the idea to strangers. It has been an intimate process. He asked them not to wear a shirt and opened the second bedroom of his home to them.

“On one hand it’s totally private,” he said. “On the other, it’s totally un-private.” He says that he can tell when some of his subjects had sex during the exposure, which is seen as a fog in the images.

You can view the photographs in-person at the Anzenberger Gallery in Vienna starting February 5, 2013 until March 8, 2013.

Also see: Long Exposure Photographs of Dancers by Bill Wadman

via CNN