Dr. Daniel Meadows on boarding school, Butlins, buses, and how his entire archive went to the Bodleian.
Photographer, documentarian and digital storyteller Daniel Meadows (b. 1952) has spent a lifetime recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through pictures, audio recordings and short movies.
He is best known for his 1973-74 journey around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus when he travelled 10,000 miles in a converted double-decker and made 958 portraits in "free studio" sessions on the streets of 22 different British towns and cities. This is a project he revisited in the 1990s, photographing again some of the subjects of those portraits for his widely published series National Portraits: Now & Then.
His pioneering community storytelling project BBC Capture Wales (2001-08) encouraged many hundreds of people across Wales to embrace the arrival of the digital age in pop-up workshops by making their own two minutes of TV, framing their memories and pictures into digital stories, "multimedia sonnets from the people". Capture Wales won a BAFTA Cymru in 2002.
Daniel taught the documentary photography course with David Hurn in Newport (1983-94); also photojournalism (1994-2001) and digital storytelling (2000-2012) at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies where he also completed his PhD in 2005. In the 1990s he taught photojournalism workshops in the emerging democracies of eastern Europe, also in India and Bangladesh. After 2000 he travelled repeatedly to Australia and the USA lecturing about his pioneering work in participatory media.
His photographs and (more recently) his short films have been exhibited widely both in the UK and on the continent of Europe. Solo shows include the ICA London (1975), The Photographers' Gallery London (1987) and the National Media Museum Bradford (2011). His books include: Living Like This – Around Britain in the Seventies (1975,) Nattering In Paradise – A Word from the Suburbs (1987), National Portraits – Photographs from the 1970s (1997), and The Bus – The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973-2001 (2001).
A detailed and scholarly overview of Daniel’s early work, Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s by Val Williams, was published in 2011.
His photo-essays done in the industrial north of England in the 1970s are celebrated in the Café Royal Books boxed set edition Eight Stories (2015).
The Daniel Meadows Archive was acquired in March 2018 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, where there is an exhibition of Daniel’s work entitled Daniel Meadows: Now and Then until November 24th this year, and the accompanying book, Now And Then: England 1970 - 2015, was recently published by the Bodleian.
On episode 116, Daniel discusses, among other things:
- His show at the Bodleian library and how they acquired his entire archive.
- His formative experience of boarding school.
- Being taught the science of photography at Manchester Poly. And meeting Martin Parr there.
- HIs Greame Street project.
- Photographing Butlins holiday camp with his friend, Martin Parr - and starting to shoot colour.
- The June Street project, also with Martin Parr.
- His love for digital storytelling and a loathing for ‘antisocial media’.
Memories of his English road trip by double decker bus and of finding some of the people he photographed 25 years later.
- Always thinking his work was 'rubbish' and not feeling a success.
Referenced:
Pete James
Val Williams
Colin Ford
Tracey Marshall
Bill Brandt
Martin Parr
Brian Griffin
Garry Winogrand
Diane Arbus
BBC Omnibus documentary Beautiful, Beautiful (1969)
Bruce Davidson
Irving Penn
Paul Trevor
Cliff Richard Summer Holiday
William Eggleston
Craig Atkinson’s Cafe Royal Books
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“I spent a lot of my life wishing that I’d taken pictures like Cartier-Bresson or Diane Arbus or Bill Brandt. And it took me a long while to learn that I’d actually taken pictures like Daniel Meadows.”