The 49 commuters in Nick Turpin's painterly series On the Night Bus are lost in their own world. Each has just left work in London's business district, and is headed home for dinner or perhaps to the pub for a pint. Shrouded by fogged windows, they thumb their phones or gaze out the window, finding moments of solitude amid the bustle of London.
“I get this feeling that these pictures are quite revealing,” Turpin says. “The people are quite vulnerable. It’s almost like I’m photographing the real them.”
The idea came to Turpin as he waited for a friend at an East Dulwich cafe on a cold, rainy evening in December, 2013. A bus passed by, its smudged windows, dotted with rain and fogged by condensation, diffusing the forms of those within. “I thought it was so incredibly beautiful for something so mundane and every day,” he says.
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 color and contrast on his best images.
The intimate images look more like paintings than photographs, and each tells a story. “There’d be a girl with her head against the window, and she would look like a Madonna figure,” Turpin says. “Another time a woman was dressed in black and the light was kind of blue, like a Picasso blue period painting.”
Turpin's gorgeous series makes something magical out of something mundane, and could only be made in a bustling city like London, where the anonymity of a crowd offers a moment of isolation.
On the Night Bus is available as a photo book.
