BUS STORIES
PHOTOGRAPHS…
Here is a visual journey through the screens of the CCTV
cameras on London buses. It looks at the states monitoring of
individuals passing through London.
On my essay I have focussed my attention in one, apparently small,
detail of such controlling policy. A new world has opened up to me.
Photographically speaking I discovered I gained a partial but absolute
“invisibility” with respect to some of the people I take pictures of.
When I stand on the lower-deck of the bus and I photograph the
people sitting on the upper-deck through the monitor, they are
totally unaware of my presence. They might be more or less
conscious of the presence of the cameras installed on the bus,
but not of me taking their pictures.
On the other hand, if I am on the same deck of the people I am
photographing at that particular moment, they are well aware of
what I am doing…
Crazily enough, in some of the pictures you could also see me taking
that photo, like a weird and spooky self-portrait.
As I keep on taking photographs of what appears on the monitor,
I start reading the behaviour and dynamics amongst me and the
passengers, and micro-stories are collected by my camera.
It’s amazing to see how natural and spontaneous we sometimes are
while we go from A to B using the buses.We look, stare, go for deep
searches in our nostrils, sleep, kiss, think, or simply and sadly look
dangerously depressed…
This is what my project wants to express, how fragile and defenceless
we really are in front of the continuos monitoring we experience,
at the expense of our intimacy and privacy, and how we are
becoming increasingly accustomed to this.