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, 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
NEWS
Daniel Meadows interviewed by Amy Davies for Amateur Photographer
Ben Smith’s podcast NOW LIVE: #116 Daniel Meadows
Blackwell Gallery, Weston Library, The Bodleian, Oxford
4 October – 24 November 2019
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.
Two astonishing Digital Stories. Late 1990s.
Home Movies (aka The Turn Film) celebrates Atchley's grandfather's annual ritual of marching his four sons out of the house, walking them up the garden path and then telling them to do a 360 degree turn for the camera. By editing several of these "turn" clips together Atchley gives us a beautiful yet funny sequence of a family growing up, something he reflects upon in voice-over. Time is telescoped.
Redheads is narrated, both to camera and in voice-over, by Atchley's mother Martha who tells of her childhood growing up on a farm in western New York State.
I paid my first visit to Atchley's Next Exit site in the spring of 2000 and we immediately began an email exchange. He invited me to attend a Centre for Digital Storytelling workshop in Berkeley, California, later that year... which I did.