Observing

This photograph series has been made in the last two years as a documentation of my daily observations – places, people, their changes and interaction. I have taken the photographs commuting on one and the same public bus, allowing the spectator guessing and anticipating the departure and the final stop, seeing the diversity of passengers and the fluidity of landscape.

People on this bus are very different. There are those for whom this drive is their first visit to Riga or, on the contrary, the last glimpse on the city. And then there are those for whom it is the everyday, boring and tedious part of life.

In the photos I want to attract the spectator’s attention to that little something, which we can notice, if we are interested enough to spot it. What we need is to look out of the bus window and around us, in order to see something beautiful and extraordinary, and, yes, sometimes it is ugly and unpleasant, in the seemingly ordinary and common surroundings. The beautiful and the ugly, the happy and the sad, the familiar and the unknown, the close and the faraway, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the looked-after and the abandoned, the modern and the ancient, the understandable and the obscure – so diverse this route is, its passengers and the landscape outside the window from the first to the last stop. And I like to see it and to catch sight of it.

Viesturs Pinka (1980) is a Latvian photographer, who has studied photography at ISSP School and other various workshops.