'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 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..."