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
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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.
Book. 1981. Camera Lucida, reflections on photography. After years of dispassionate analysis Barthes comes across a photograph of his mother as a child, the "winter garden photograph". He lets his feelings in and suddenly the ideas start bouncing off the page: "I had discovered this photograph by moving back through Time? I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love. Starting from her latest image, taken the summer before her death (so tired, so noble, sitting in front of the door of our house, surrounded by my friends), I arrived, traversing three quarters of a century, at the image of a child: I stare intensely at the Sovereign Good of childhood, of the mother, of the mother-as-child. Of course I was then losing her twice over, in her final fatigue and in her first photograph, for me the last; but it was also at this moment that everything turned around and I discovered her as unto herself. "
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.