FROOM OUR BOOKSHELF
“Preston Bus Station” by Jamie Hawkesworth
Some places don’t need to be photographed, they need to be listened to. Preston Bus Station is one of them. Brutalist, oversized, seemingly impersonal, this concrete landmark in northern England became, for Jamie Hawkesworth, a visual and human laboratory, a site of return, a school of looking. The book gathers a series of portraits taken daily over a month in 2013, when the building was threatened with demolition. Hawkesworth returned to Preston and spent every day inside the station not to document it in the journalistic sense, but to intuit its identity through the bodies that passed through it.
Preston Bus Station is, at once, portrait and place, rhythm and flow, archive and threshold. Hawkesworth photographed people who didn’t expect to be seen. People in transit between one bus and the next. The Brutalist structure, with its massive curves and concrete repetition, becomes the unlikely stage for moments of sudden delicacy: school kids with backpacks, mothers with strollers, workers on a break, uncertain stares, mundane details that accumulate into something essential.
Hawkesworth’s photography is not about capturing the perfect shot it’s about capturing time. His is a gentle but unsentimental gesture, oscillating between documentary observation and a nearly invisible formal language. The result is a book that doesn’t just represent the station, it constructs it through the bodies that inhabit it. The sequence is quiet. There are no captions.
No contextual explanation. Each portrait is frontal, yet never intrusive. The background is constant: the station, with its fluorescent lighting, railings, curved canopies, tiled walls. But what shifts, with hypnotic rhythm, are the people, their clothes, their gestures, their way of holding space. The book reads like a continuous flow: an architecture made of faces.
What’s most striking is the ethical clarity of the project. There is no spectacle, no performative aestheticization. These are not “types.” Each person appears with a kind of irreducible presence and yet each is part of a broader, collective portrait of a public space. In a moment when urban environments are increasingly branded, surveilled, and controlled, Preston Bus Station reminds us that public space is also a living archive of invisible stories.
We keep Bare Handed on our studio shelf because it teaches something we often forget in visual culture: that to see differently, you must first unlearn how you were taught to see. It’s a book that challenges the pace and polish of contemporary image-making. A reminder that photography can still be an act of trust. A medium not for control, but for relation.
We recommend it not because it inspires (though it does) but because it repositions the image. Not as proof. Not as product. But as a field of contact. Bare Handed proposes a way of looking that is generous, precise, and above all, porous. It’s a book that doesn’t ask to be consumed, it asks to be accompanied.
