We often associate waiting with boredom.

With a time that remains unused, but somehow belongs to our everyday life.

We are happy to wait for beautiful things like summer or Christmas.

But waiting is often as banal as it is now because the bus or train is late.

Those who choose public transport are therefore faced with waiting more often than they would like.

A specific type of architecture has established itself in our urban and rural landscape.

Bus shelters, train stations, platforms.

Some sober shelters, others magnificent, playful buildings.

Ben Kuhlman

picture editor.

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Dieter Leistner, who has helped shape architectural photography in Germany since the 1980s, followed precisely this strict central perspective from architectural photography in his documentation of bus shelters.

In his photos, the buildings form a framework that is filled by the people who use this space.

His pictures are subject to a strict composition.

The straight lines of the images are often only broken by the people waiting and their actions (or inaction).

People, no matter what country or culture, are the variable in his pictures, which often make the viewer smile.

Who waits how?

We find it difficult to wait.

Waiting time is wasted time.

We sit or stand around, look at our displays and try not to get bored.

It is often difficult to pause.

The photographer couldn't pause either.

Leistner was always on the lookout for new motifs, pursued new ideas and, as a professor of photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg/Schweinfurt, made it possible for his students to exhibit in Kyrgyzstan and be sent all over the world for a partner city project.

For his work of the waiting people he often had to wait himself, which is why a self-portrait has not crept into his series without reason.

Dieter Leistner died unexpectedly at the age of 69.

Excerpts from the book WAITING, published by av edition GmbH, Stuttgart, ISBN: 978-3-89986-314-7 with 156 pages and 70 illustrations.

Images published with the kind permission of the publisher.