Nick Turpin- On The Night Bus
The steamed windows of the buses create an optical illusion; softening and blurring the faces of those behind the glass, raising questions about voyeurism and public and private space.
Shot over two winters at the Elephant and Castle roundabout in London, and taken with a telephoto lens, the images reveal an intimate glimpse into the life of the city traveller. Some passengers interact with each other, some sleep, some are moody and pensive, others lost in faraway thoughts. All are strangely silent behind the cold wintery glass that, alongside the artificial light in the bus, renders these everyday scenes into something akin to classical paintings.
He spent the next three years making more than 4,000 photographs of bus windows. He would don his coat and fingerless gloves on dreary, wet winter days and set out for the Elephant and Castle station in south London. Beneath the nearbyred elephant statue sits a raised platform where he would stand to each shot. Buses passed by every few minutes between 5:30 and 7:30 pm, crammed with commuters.
Whenever a bus pulled up, he would hurry down the platform, peering into each of its 12 windows to spot the most interesting passengers. Hidden by the dark and distance, Turpin snapped candid shots with a Canon 5D Mark II and III, a long 300 mm lens and a slow shutter speed of 1/40 per second to compensate for the low light. He'd get five or six images before the bus drove away. He used Photoshop to adjust the colour and contrast on his best images.
In a interview Nick says that he choose London because "London has been my home for 28 years, it’s the biggest city in Europe and I’ve photographed on its streets for most of that time. This series started with a single observation one evening from a street-side café table and grew from there, I saw a figure in a frosted steamed up bus window and thought, that’s often me in there. I was really surprised at how beautiful this mundane scene was.
I have often travelled to photograph but there is something autobiographical about photographing in your own home city, it has more personal relevance but it’s also harder to find the special and unusual in the familiar."
