The Hyman Collection includes 6 framed exhibition prints from Daniel Meadows' 'Nattering in Paradise' series on English suburbia in the Thatcher years.
Like many British photographers in the 1980s, Daniel Meadows became interested in the representation of the new 'affluent' Britain, under the leadership of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He used both black and white documentary photography, and an extensive series of taped interviews, made mostly in the London Borough of Bromley, to produce the exhibition 'Nattering in Paradise' (Photographers' Gallery, London; Olivier Gallery, National Theatre, London: 1987-88) and book 'Nattering In Paradise - A Word from the Suburbs' (Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Daniel Meadows recalls:
In the mid-eighties, in the Kentish suburb where Mrs Thatcher had raised her own family, property values were increasing so rapidly (at least 20 per cent per annum) that home-owners found themselves living in a state of seemingly infinite possibility. In south Wales, where I was raising my family, the miners were all on strike and there was real hardship. I thought I'd take a peep into Maggie's looking glass.
The Hyman Collection is grateful to Daniel Meadows for his assistance in cataloguing these pictures.
