At the start of 2013, John Shinnick, a Manchester photographer, set out to document the people using a city centre bus stop in Manchester; a quiet stop where people rarely alight and where five people is a busy day.

It’s a stop that takes people to the North of the city: Oldham, Sholver, Failsworth. He was looking, perhaps, to get some interesting portraits, but ended up with a whole lot more: Bus Stop Stories.

He reckoned that he would have a couple of minutes to engage with people and convince them to let him take their portrait before their bus arrived but what he found was that, at this quiet bus stop, that couple of minutes would often turn into a longer period.
And in that time people would start to tell him their stories.

This exhibition is a connection between those people, their portraits and the words they spoke. It is not a verbatim transcript, more a quickly jotted memory and set out in the form of one side of a conversation. At first, with the immediacy of people's willingness to speak to a stranger with a camera, John thought it was a story of loneliness and isolation, but he came to recognise that it is more a story of our collective wish to be more connected than accepted social etiquette allows.

John Shinnick is a photographer, business adviser, coach, former partner in an accounting practice and he talks to people. You can view more of his work at www.shinnick.info.