This work was first published as The Daniel Meadows Archive, The Shop on Greame Street, 1972, in the academic journal Photography & Culture, vol.3, issue 1, pp.81-90, March 2010
--------------------
The Shop on Greame St
r/t: 4 min, 46 sec.
In 1972, when I was a student at Manchester Poly, I ran a free portrait studio in a disused barber's shop in the city's Moss Side district.
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..."
The Shop on Greame Street
In the spring of 1972 I rented a disused barber's shop on Greame Street, Moss Side, in Manchester's inner city and opened a free photographic studio. I took photographs of local residents as their streets were being torn down for urban regeneration.
In August 2017 I returned to the city and worked with Dominic Callaghan, a producer from BBC Inside Out North West, making a film with some of the people from those photographs, now mostly in their fifties, who talked about what it was like to grow up in Moss Side at that time and how demolition and resettlement affected their lives.
It's the nature of documentary photography that it can take a very long time to reach an audience outside of its original context. So, even though it's forty-six years since I made these pictures, it doesn't surprise me that they're at last being noticed. Here's a BBC Online feature from 2017:
BBC Online feature, first posted 16.10.17
I love it when people spot themselves in the pictures and contact me.
I get particularly excited about these Moss Side photographs because, although my archive contains fascinating fragments of typescript and also some audio recordings, no proper list of the names of those photographed has survived. So, every time someone who is depicted makes themselves known, my research progresses.
In 2105 I met up with Neville Davis, formerly of Richmond Street in Moss Side. Here's a little film about our reunion, made by the Midlands based community arts organisation Multistory.