This is Photobus by Daniel Meadows, homepage of the Free Photographic Omnibus and Digital Stories. Photobus is a journey in photo documentary. It began in the 1970s with still photographs and continues into the present, a time when pictures have discovered the talkies.

Once upon a time I lived in a double-decker bus, reg. JRR 404, better known as the Free Photographic Omnibus. She was my home, my travelling darkroom and gallery.

We were an unlikely couple; she with her crash gear box and temperamental ways, me with my bushy hair and homemade flares. But we got along okay and, during 1973 and '74, we travelled about making a national portrait of the English. We covered 10,000 miles shooting pictures and giving them away.

The bus's glory days, taking holiday-makers on seaside runs to Skegness and Mablethorpe, were in the 1950s but, by the time I got to know her, she was 25 years old and (it has to be said) past her best. By comparison I -- fresh out of art school and all of four years her junior -- was just a whipper-snapper.

Secret History
Amazingly JRR 404 is still with us. Thought to be the last remaining model of her class and type she has been acquired by the Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Trust (link opens in a new window) who have her on show in their museum at Wythall, UK, where she is listed as "exotica" under "other" and "rare". Much is made of her exceptional spec: her side gangways and front entrance, her air operated doors, her fluted mouldings and her illuminated signs. But there's no mention of her secret history, the fourteen months back in the early 'seventies when she dropped out, did her own thing, experimented with alternative living and tried to change the world. You have to be on Photobus to learn about that.

Here the adventure continues, our journey serving as an exemplar for a contemporary value system which embraces the expectation that we should all participate in the conversation that mass media is becoming.

There's a lot about participatory media on Photobus and a lot more about the stories that live in photographs.

So welcome aboard. Make a start by viewing our story The Bus.

 



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Barton Transport Ltd., Chilwell, Nottingham, bill of sale no. K2974 for bus no. 473 to Mr. Meadows of Great Washbourne, Tewkesbury: £360.20, 24 July 1973, signed P. Gibson, cashier

 













Polyfoto

r/t: 2 min, 23 sec.

In the UK when we ask: "Where are you from?" what we really want to know about, even more than your place of birth, is your class and background.

Here's a story about the England I come from.
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<< Roland Barthes >>
Inspirations: 3 of 10 - Book. 1981. Camera Lucida, reflections on photogaphy. After years of cool (dispassionate?) analysis Barthes comes across a photograph of his mother as a child, the "winter garden photograph". He lets his feelings in and suddenly the ideas start bouncing off the page: "I had discovered this photograph by moving back through Time? I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love. Starting from her latest image, taken the summer before her death (so tired, so noble, sitting in front of the door of our house, surrounded by my friends), I arrived, traversing three quarters of a century, at the image of a child: I stare intensely at the Sovereign Good of childhood, of the mother, of the mother-as-child. Of course I was then losing her twice over, in her final fatigue and in her first photograph, for me the last; but it was also at this moment that everything turned around and I discovered her as unto herself. "