Daniel Meadows. Free Photographic Omnibus
50th Anniversary Exhibition (1973-2023)
5 October - 22 December 2023
Centre for British Photography
On 22 September 1973, from the car park behind Impressions Gallery in York, Daniel Meadows set off on a long-planned adventure in the rickety 1948 double-decker bus that he'd repurposed as his home, gallery and darkroom. His mission? To make a portrait of England. He was twenty-one years old.
"Meadows was making a different kind of portrait, one more susceptible to the changing cultural climate of the decade, with a greater feeling of collaboration, or at least a sense of the subject controlling the photographer rather than the other way round… Pop up studios are popular today, but in the 1970s this was a unique initiative." Gerry Badger: Another Country, British Documentary Photography since 1945, pp 115 & 156 (Thames & Hudson, 2022)
Over the next 14 months, travelling alone, Meadows criss-crossed the country covering 10,000 miles. He photographed 958 people in 22 towns and cities and made audio recordings. He developed and printed the photographs as he went along giving them away for free to those who posed for his camera. Crowd-funded, his project also benefited from two Arts Council of Great Britain awards. In October 1975 he presented the finished work in an exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and launched his account of the journey with a book Living Like This (Arrow).
"The Free Photographic Omnibus is a fascinating combination of countercultural values, socialist principles, organisational and financial acumen, photographic and literary experimentation, some naivety and a considerable amount of courage. It succeeded because it was highly original and attractive to its sponsors, its participants and to its eventual audience. A brilliant idea of the 1970s, its appeal has not diminished." Val Williams, Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s, p 149 (Photoworks, 2011).
The Daniel Meadows Book of the Road (Bluecoat Press, 2023) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Free Photographic Omnibus by employing various different storytelling techniques. First is the imagery he made during the trip. These photographs were created using two different camera formats, 35mm as well as 2¼ square, hence the constantly shifting aspect ratio of the pictures on the page, a number of which are reproduced for the first time.
Alongside the photographs is a selection of extracts drawn from the written journals and audio diaries Meadows made while on the road. Much of this also appears in print for the first time. To preserve the veracity of this material, the text has been reproduced using the spelling, grammar and punctuation as it originally fell onto the page, while the audio recordings have been transcribed verbatim.
The book also contains pictures from the series Now and Then made in the 1990s when Daniel revisited some of those he had first encountered on the bus.
This exhibition at the Centre for British Photography in London, opening to the public on 5 October 2023, features Daniel Meadows photographs from The Hyman Collection as well as previously unseen works of documentary reportage that Meadows made during his travels.
About Daniel Meadows
Daniel Meadows (b.1952) is a documentarist. He has spent a lifetime recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through photography, audio recordings and short movies.
He studied at Manchester Polytechnic 1970-73 alongside Peter Fraser, Brian Griffin and Charlie Meecham, also Martin Parr with whom he collaborated on two projects: Butlin’s by the Sea in Yorkshire (1972) and June Street, Salford (1973). He is best known for his 1973-74 tour of England in the Free Photographic Omnibus from which he ran free portrait sessions in towns and cities across the country. His account of that journey: Living Like This - Around Britain in the Seventies was published in 1975.
In the late Seventies he worked as photographer-in-residence to the Borough of Pendle in Lancashire.
He moved to Wales in 1983 to teach alongside David Hurn on the renowned Documentary Photography course in Newport. In 1994 he joined Cardiff University to teach photojournalism at the Centre for Journalism Studies.
In the 1990s he also taught photojournalism workshops for the Reuters Foundation, The British Council and others in the emerging democracies of Europe; also in India and Bangladesh.
After travelling in the USA to research ways of applying new technology in community engagement, he was seconded to the BBC to deliver the digital storytelling project Capture Wales which was recognised with a BAFTA Cymru award in 2002.
Between 2000 and 2008 he travelled widely (mostly in Australia and the USA) lecturing about his pioneering work in participatory media.
He was awarded his PhD in 2005.
Widely published his work has been exhibited at home and abroad. In 2007 it was included in Tate Britain’s historical survey show of British photography How We Are. His books include Now and Then: England 1970-2015 (Bodleian Library, 2019) and The Bus: The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973–2001 (Harvill Press, 2001).
In 2019 his archive was acquired by the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.
For a fuller story see: www.danielmeadows.co.uk
