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.
My forthcoming book Now and Then: England 1970-2015 – from Bodleian Library Publishing – is now available on advance order. Read all about it:
Daniel Meadows is a pioneer of contemporary British docu-
mentary 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.
VISIT THE EXHIBITION
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Now and Then: Daniel Meadows
October – November 2019
Daniel Meadows’ photographs have been exhibited widely with solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London (1975), Camerawork Gallery (1978), the Photographers' Gallery (1987) and a touring retrospective from the National Science and Media Museum (2011). Group shows include Tate Britain (2007) and Hayward Gallery Touring (2008).
- Hardback
- 160 pages, 259 x 237 mm
- 4 colour and 105 b&w illustrations
- ISBN: 9781851245338
- Publication 4 October 2019
NEWS
Elaine Constantine on Daniel Meadows: “It’s the work of a person who has tirelessly tried to communicate the stories of ordinary people, their motivations and triumphs as well as their humble and changing circumstances”
OUT TODAY: This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History by Jon Savage
Modern Nature Symposium
Martin Parr: Return to Manchester includes June Street, Salford 1973, a collaborative project with Daniel Meadows
Boot-boys are 'Big Picture' in the Observer.
Kelly McErlean's new book, Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, London: Routledge, pp.14-15
Daniel Meadows and Niall McDiarmid, walk-and-talk at the Martin Parr Foundation.
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.
James Agee and Walker Evans. Book. 1941. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Sent in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the poverty of white sharecroppers in Alabama, Agee and photographer Evans stretched out the assignment and made a book instead. Agee didn't have a rule book to tell him what precisely to document. So he precisely documented everything: from the depth of dust in a drawer to his passionate feelings for one of his subjects. Here he observes a family preparing to be photographed by Evans: "...looking into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other..."