Daniel Meadows

I am a Documentarist
Here is my CV.

Photographer and university lecturer Daniel Meadows has been described by the American commentator J.D. Lasica (all links open in a new window) as "one of the icons of the Digital Storytelling movement".

He is also recognised as a prime mover in the new documentary photography movement of 1970s Britain.

Early Projects
Born in Gloucestershire, England, in 1952 Meadows studied at Manchester Polytechnic 1970-73. Notable photography projects from that time include The Shop On Greame Street in Moss Side (1972) as well as collaborations with Martin Parr: Butlin's By The Sea in Yorkshire (1972) and June Street in Salford (1973).

Meadows toured England in the Free Photographic Omnibus (1973-74) running free portrait studios in towns and cities across the country. His account of that journey: Living Like This - Around Britain In The Seventies (Arrow Books) was published in 1975.

Other Documentary Work includes
1972: Stockport Gypsies.
1975-77: Photographer-in-Residence, Pendle District, Lancashire.
1975-83: New Society commissions.
1976-81: Welfare State International.
1978: Clayton Ward, Prestwich Hospital, Manchester.
1979-80: Factory Records.
1981 and '83: Co. Durham Social Services dept.
1984-85: Suburbia, Bromley, Kent.
1995-2001: National Portraits, Now & Then.

Granada TV
1978-80 Meadows worked as a researcher and occasional presenter for local programmes in Manchester.

Movie Stills
Between 1981 and 1994 Meadows worked as a freelance publicity photographer in the movie and TV business, mainly for film directors Tony Palmer (biopics of Shostakovich, Wagner, Mitsuko Uchida, Yehudi Menuhin), Christine Edzard (Little Dorrit, The Fool) and Ken Russell (The Mystery of Dr. Martinu, Lady Chatterley's Lover).

Teaching
In 1983 he moved to Wales and taught alongside David Hurn on the Documentary Photography course at Newport's School of Art and Design.

Since 1994, Meadows has taught at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. Currently he delivers classes in photo-appreciation and participatory media to both undergraduates and postgraduates. He also supervises dissertations across the range from BA to PhD.

Research Overview
Since 1998 Meadows has been studying the active relationship we all have with the photographs we own, which represent us and in which our stories are contained. This has led him away from being one who "does media to people" to being one who facilitates others in the making of their own media. His PhD, awarded in 2005, tells the story of this journey and explains his innovative multimedia work.

Funded Research
* 2001-2006: following a research trip to the USA, he took the idea of Digital Storytelling to the BBC where, for five years, he was creative director of Capture Wales, a project which has been described as "the most ambitious of all the BBC's user generated content offerings".
* 2007-2008: Arts and Humanities Research Council & BBC Pilot Knowledge Exchange Programme Scheme: A Public Voice - Access, Digital Story and Interactive Narrative, a collaboration with Dept. Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan. Meadows's role was to undertake an audit of Digital Storytelling practice in Wales. See pp178-222 of the research document.

Current Research
The Daniel Meadows Archive: an investigation. Meadows is working with Professor Val Williams, director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) at the University of the Arts London (UAL) to investigate his archive -- almost forty years of documentary photographs, sound recordings and storytelling -- containing many thousands of negatives, plus audio tapes and digital stories. Cataloguing of the archive began in June 2008. Williams formally joined the project in October 2009, after being awarded a UAL funded sabbatical.

The objective of this project is to establish a research context within which the archive can be properly explored, in relation not only to photography and oral history, but also to the social, physical, historical and cultural contexts which have determined documentary practice since 1970. The aim is to establish a research network which will explore this context in an interdisciplinary way.

The outcomes of the project are planned as a book and a travelling exhibition, plus research network seminars and a one-day conference.

Interested parties include: Photoworks UK, the University of the Arts London, Birmingham Central Libraries, and the University of Wales, Newport.

Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1975); Camerawork, London (1978); Photographers' Gallery, London (1987); Royal Photographic Society, Bath (1996); and Viewpont Gallery, Salford (1997).

In the summer of 2007 his work was included in Tate Britain's landmark photography exhibition How We Are, Photographing Britain.

Work in Public Collections
* Birmingham Central Library, the Sir Benjamin Stone legacy collection: twelve photographs from the Free Photographic Omnibus purchased in 2009 with an award from The Art Fund.
* Salford City, Salford: June Street (with Martin Parr), a series of group portraits from 1973 of families in Lower Broughton, Salford, gathered in their front rooms.
* Victoria & Albert Museum, London: pictures from group exhibition The Other Britain, 1982, commemorating the 20th anniversary of New Society magazine.

Books
* Meadows, Daniel. (2001) The Bus. London: The Harvill Press.
* Meadows, Daniel. (1997) National Portraits -- Photographs from the 1970s by Daniel Meadows, edited by Val Williams. Salford: Viewpoint Photography Gallery, and Derby: Montage Gallery.
* Meadows, Daniel. (1993) Set Pieces -- Being About Film Stills Mostly. London: BFI Publications.
* Meadows, Daniel. (1988) Nattering In Paradise -- A Word from the Suburbs. London: Simon & Schuster.
* Meadows, Daniel. (1975) Living Like This -- Around Britain In The Seventies. London: Arrow Books.

Book Chapters include
* Meadows, Daniel, and Kidd, Jenny. (2009) Capture Wales, The BBC Digital Storytelling Project in Hartley, J, and McWilliam, K, (eds.) Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
* Meadows, Daniel. (1999) Then and Now in Jack, I, (ed.) Love Stories: Granta no. 68 (pp 105-142). London: Granta.

International
In the 1990s Meadows taught photojournalism workshops for the Reuters Foundation, The British Council and others in the emerging democracies of Europe; also in India and Bangladesh. Since 2000 has travelled widely (mostly in Australia and the USA) lecturing about his pioneering work in participatory media.

Awards
2008: Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
2006: Cardiff University Innovation Network Prize for BBC Capture Wales.
2002: BAFTA Cymru for BBC Capture Wales.

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Visit Amazon Books and buy The Bus: The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973-2001, an adventure in documentary by Daniel Meadows, The Harvill Press (London) 2001. ISBN 1 86046 842 X (link opens in a new window).

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Visit Retro To Go - "a guide to all things hip and retro" and see Living Like This: Around Britain In the Seventies by Daniel Meadows, Arrow Books (London) 1975. ISBN 0 09 911400 3.

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