Travis Huggett

Travis Huggett is a New York City-based photographer who grew up in Rhode Island. He earned a BFA in photography from The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Working primarily in portraiture, advertising and fashion, his photos have been exhibited in New York City, Boston and Connecticut. His work has been seen on billboards, as album covers, and on his mother’s mantelpiece.

His work consists of people getting on with their lives on a bus. It shows them taking a journey, whether that be from home to work or on their way to the airport to travel the world. It shows the reality of the real world.

‘For years I’d watched the buses move through the city streets at night, the interiors glowing, the windows framing the riders. They looked to me like photographs. In 2013 I started shooting through those windows. I would wait at bus stops and red lights, quickly scanning the windows for interesting subjects, hoping they’d be in the right seat, in the right light. Over time the photos started feeling less like individual portraits, and more like a broader portrait of my neighborhood and my city.’ – Travis Huggett

Visual response:

In this image you can see a man standing up on a bus, with at first glance he seems to be looking directly at the camera, however as you look closer he seems to be gazing off at something else, maybe at nothing, seeming unbothered or even too tired to care about the fact that a random stranger was taking an image of him. The way he looks gives us in insight into about hard and tiring the daily life of a person can be. The black outline of the window creates a simple yet effective boarder which frames and makes us focus on the subject. The dirtiness of the windows also adds a realistic factor to it, showing the true reality of every day lives of people in New York.

Technical response:

The subject seems to be more focused on compared to the people around him, who seem a little blurred and out of focus. From the image, and how he took it, it’s most likely that he used a long-lensed camera to get the close ups of the photographs he got. It doesn’t look like he did too much editing to the image, the most I think he did was adjust the lighting and the contrast, making the light in the image stand out more. Also, this photograph could also follow the rule of 3s, since there are three people in this image.

Contextual response:

This image was captured for one of his series called Last Night At The Bus Stop. Before he captured images like the one above, he would often feel a strong urge to, due to the interesting people, the light, the windows framing the subjects. He found those all interesting and thought he’d take advantage of it by shooting through the windows, catching interesting characters in their daily lives. He would wait at bus stops at night, look for people who he thought would be perfect for this photoshoot, and wait for them to get into a good light. Then he would take his image.