Finding Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia (1983)
Finding Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia (1983)
Joel Silverman in research collaboration with Jason Francisco, October 2026
I first saw Joel Sternfeld’s astonishing Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April (1983) in 2023 at the High Museum’s landmark survey of Southern photography, “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.”
One of the most well-known social documentary photographs of the 1980s, Sternfeld’s image has been written about widely, but as far as I know, nobody has ever tracked down exactly where it was taken.
Obviously it was taken in Sandy Springs somewhere inside I-285; the MARTA bus that these housekeepers are waiting for famously didn’t go outside the Perimeter to Cobb County, and the giant 1980s houses in the scene are too new to be Buckhead homes.
I zoomed in to play Sherlock Holmes and scour the scene for details.
Easy pickings to notice that there are houses numbered 200 and 210.
A distinctive street lamp and some ugly Georgia Power utility boxes.
A triangular-shaped sewer drain traps all the water pouring down this steep street when it rains.
I wondered if I could find the scene from this distinctive brick house alone, with a rounded front door and nine windows in front.
Many of the houses seem to have the same rounded brick mailbox.
I decided to consult a topographic map when I noticed that the first driveway slopes down, the second driveway is level, and all other driveways slope upwards.
After three years of musing about it, I finally tracked down Sternfeld’s site at 200 Cameron Ridge Drive, in Sandy Springs, exactly the neighborhood where I expected I’d find it. Cameron Glen was built on enormous two-acre lots around 1979–1981. The pine trees planted then had grown so much over half a century that Sternfeld’s famous suburban vista was almost unrecognizable.
Here is the driveway numbered 200.
And here is 210.
The triangular-shaped drain.
I found that street lamp.
Those ugly Georgia Power utility boxes haven’t changed much in 43 years.
And my hunch is totally confirmed when I find the brick house with the rounded entrance and nine front windows.
An interesting aside, pointed out by my frequent partner in photo sleuthing, the photographer Jason Francisco: Sternfeld was facing south when he made Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta. These shadows are cast by a sun rising in the east. The housekeepers aren’t waiting for the afternoon bus; they only just arrived to start their workday! They are clutching lunches in grocery bags as they prepare to clean a well-stocked house where they won’t be encouraged to fix themselves lunch before they clean the kitchen. When this scene appeared in Sternfeld’s terrific and slightly surreal American Prospects book in 1987, perhaps an editor captioned it without checking with Sternfeld first, and that title is now in the catalog of the many museums who hold this image in their collections. History becomes shrouded in mystery and blurs in funny ways like this.