A city bus is a world on wheels, a rolling summary of the community it serves.
Like the passengers and passersby reflected in its broad windows, humanity is mirrored on the bus: kids riding to school, an old man nodding to his own private metronome, the sleeping shift worker, the couple with their baby, shoppers returning from market, the buttoned-down businessman tapping at his BlackBerry, rowdy club kids, the woman in the wheelchair, the hulking guy sporting jailhouse tattoos.
Denver’s 0-line bus — the “Broadway Express” — courses from Highlands Ranch to LoDo’s Market Street Station like a humming circuit cable through the metro area.
Some riders use the bus because they want to, others because they must. It’s a convenience on inclement days, a necessity when you don’t have a vehicle of your own.
Climb aboard the bus, and you encounter a study in how private people behave in a public place. Some keep to themselves, curling up in a far seat, avoiding eye contact. Others are garrulous, chatting up strangers and in general treating the bus as their living room.
A bus also makes for a fine place to think. You can marshal your thoughts on the way to your job, empty your head on the way home.
The street changes too — just like the mood of the passengers.
Broadway clubs and bars that are shuttered during the day pulse at night. Storefronts and lunch joints that bustle at noon go dark and tuck themselves in when the sun sets and street lights glow.
For six weeks in May and June, Denver Post photographer Craig Walker rode the 0-line bus to and from work.
He hopped on in Englewood in the morning and rode north to the Broadway station at Colfax Avenue. Come evening, he was back on the bus heading south.
And every day he carried his Nikon D3 camera.
Walker used four lenses — 20mm, 24mm, 35mm and 85mm — although he never brought more than two at a time.
What started as a deeply personal project, an old-school exercise in street photography, grew and morphed.
“My goal was to make one picture a day,” Walker said. “I shot more than that, hundreds of images actually, but I wanted to capture at least one moment.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
