Photo by Sheldon Anderson
This was taken on my family’s farm outside of Quitman, Louisiana. They threw nothing out so all their old cars and trucks were just left in the woods to fade away. “Grandpa’s First Schoolbus” was exactly that: his first of many over his forty years of driving. I seem to recall this being an early 1940s model. It wasn’t until the ’70s that I would ride home with him on Fridays. It was one of my fondest memories, sitting next to him operating the “stop” flag that opens on the side of the bus ... —Sheldon Anderson
Sheldon Anderson focuses on a camera’s limitations. No, he’s not a “glass-half-empty” kind of guy. The opposite, in fact—he espies the world’s beauty and aims to harness it. “We can see much more than the camera,” said Anderson. “So if I can see something, I can capture it.”
For Anderson, photography is a matter of reconstruction. He cited a trip to the Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona, last February; the frame of his camera could not contain the grand, sprawling scene before him, so he settled on a work-around. “You can’t capture it all in one image,” said Anderson. “So you photograph here, move, photograph there.” Later at his computer, he stitched the shots together to concoct what he had initially seen in his mind’s eye.
Sometimes Anderson just happens upon sights he hopes to preserve. But he’s known the relic profiled here his entire life. “I was climbing on that bus as far back as I can remember,” he said. His grandfather drove the 1940s model, Anderson taking the occasional ride alongside him.
The bus still sits on Anderson’s property; its most recent relocation extracted the vehicle from a chokehold of encroaching trees.
Retouching the photograph, Anderson did not try to emulate his present-day view. “I gave it some age,” he said. “As if it had been in a shoebox and someone pulled it out to show you.”
Sheldon Anderson was named the Louisiana Photographic Society’s Overall Photographer of the Year for 2014. View more of his work at geauxphotography.com.
Part of our Relics: 2015 Photo Project. View all our featured relics—or submit your own—here.
