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.
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NOW AND THEN: ENGLAND 1970-2015 (Bodleian Library Publishing), my latest book (RRP £25) can be bought here:
“Daniel Meadows is a pioneer of contemporary British documentary practice. His photographs and audio recordings, made over forty-five years, capture the life of England's ‘great ordinary’. Challenging the status quo by working collaboratively, he has fashioned from his many encounters a nation's story both magical and familiar.
“This book includes important work from Meadows’ ground-breaking projects, drawing on the archives now held at the Bodleian Library. Fiercely independent, Meadows devised many of his creative processes: he ran a free portrait studio in Manchester's Moss Side in 1972, then travelled 10,000 miles making a national portrait from his converted double-decker the Free Photographic Omnibus, a project he revisited a quarter of a century later. At the turn of the millennium he adopted new ‘kitchen table’ technologies to make digital stories: ‘multimedia sonnets from the people’, as he called them. He sometimes returned to those he had photographed, listening for how things were and how they had changed. Through their unique voices he finds a moving and insightful commentary on life in Britain. Then and now. Now and then.”
- Hardback
- 160 pages, 259 x 237 mm
- 4 colour and 105 b&w illustrations
- ISBN: 9781851245338
- Publication 4 October 2019
Also available from all the usual places including:
Hive, Bookshop, AbeBooks and Amazon.
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EIGHT STORIES + ONE
Café Royal Books (CRB) has reprinted my Eight Stories boxset from 2015 as Eight Stories + One in an edition of 100. Price: £55
Box is hand made, covered and foiled in the UK
Books are printed in the UK
Box dimension: 203 x 141 x 26 mm
Each book: 140mm x 200mm, b/w digital
Publication: 2 November 2020
The eight CRB zines in the set are:
- Stockport Gypsies 1971 (12 images)
- Bancroft Shed Weaving 1976 (23 images)
- Bancroft Shed Engine House 1976 (15 images)
- Weldone Boiler Fluers 1976-1977 (14 images)
- Steeplejack 1976 (10 images)
- Pig Killing 1976-1977 (18 images)
- Welfare State International 1976-1983 (18 images)
- Clayton Ward 1978 (20 images)
- …and the '+ One' is my essay The Daniel Meadows Archive in Nine People (1 image), a reprint of my Offline Journal article, October 2019. The essay replaces the compilation DVD which came bundled with the 2015 edition but which can now be seen on Vimeo r/t: 23 mins.
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NEWS
But don't worry, Café Royal Books is doing a second print run to be be released on 28 May 2021.
'Facing Britain', British documentary photography since the 1960s
Museum Goch, Germany
27 September – 8 November 2020
Daniel Meadows interviewed by Amy Davies for Amateur Photographer
Ben Smith’s podcast NOW LIVE: #116 Daniel Meadows
Boot-boys are 'Big Picture' in the Observer.
Polyfoto
r/t: 2 min, 23 sec.
In the UK when we ask: "Where are you from?" we want to know a lot more about you than just your place of birth.
This story is about the England I come from.
Book. 1981. Camera Lucida, reflections on photography. After years of 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. "