Nick Turpin for Photography on a Postcard

Nick Turpin is a street photographer who founded the photography collective iN-PUBLiC in 2000. iN-PUBLiC provides a home for street photographers and promotes the genre to continue to explore it's possibilities. He has been labelled 'one of the best street photographers' by Phil Coomes (BBC News). However, Nick also works in advertising and design, including the press photographer for The Independent and shooting the cover for the novel Bridget Jones Diary. 

Recently Nick has become most revered for his self-published book 'On the Night Bus' (2016), a collection of portraits of commuters photographed on London buses. Nick spent four cold winters photographing people through the windows of buses between 5.30-7.30 pm. He used a long lens and very slow shutter speed. The outcome is a set of dreamy and contemplative portraits that seem to glow with a painterly quality. In his own words these pictures depict a ‘period of anonymous no mans land between work and home, a transition of the person known by their colleagues to the person known by their family and friends'. Turpin uses the metaphor of the bus as a vessel in which we morph from one version of ourselves to the next. They also have a sort of voyeuristic quality, as if the person on the inside of the bus cannot see out to the person capturing an intimate private moment, therefore playing with the idea of the public and the private spheres. The public bus facilitates private moments that then become points of public interest in Nick's photographs. The hardback book has 104 pages with a cloth covered back case and spine, gold foiled. The book is 160 x 228mm and contains a foreword by renowned novelist and commentator Will Self. 

We are excited to reveal that Nick Turpin's photo postcard will be one taken from this series. It is in fact, one of my favourites in the series, I love the composition of the heads descending backwards until you can't make sense of them. The colours match the frosty sombre tone of the winter's evening. The condensation creates a painterly quality similar to the work of Gerhard Richter, forming streaks, blurs and waves, creating distortions and patterns. It's beautiful. 

If you would like the chance to exhibit next to Nick Turpin's gorgeous work, as well as other photography legends such as Martin Parr, Dougie Wallace and Liz Collins, then head to http://bit.ly/2r0MUE4. 

About the writer

Rosa Torr has a BA in Politics and Philosophy from University College Dublin, though she herself is from London. Her place of interest is political theory and in particular Gender Studies. Rosa has written for numerous online publications and the University Observer. She is also a theatre maker and is currently co-artistic director of BUMP&GRIND Theatre Company. The show she co-wrote BUMP will be on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.