This research project is led by Professor Val Williams(University of the Arts, London College of Communication) and Dr Daniel Meadows (University of Wales, Cardiff).
It began in 2009, with a series of meetings between Val Williams and Daniel Meadows, and was launched as a research project, under the auspices of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at LCC, during Val Williams' sabbatical in the autumn term of 2009.
Since then, the project has held three invited research seminars, two at the Meadows Archive in Monmouth, and the third at Birmingham Central Library, at the invitation of Pete James, curator of photographs.
Val Williams has made three research visits to the Archive, working primarily on the collections of papers, and Daniel Meadows has produced a comprehensive listing of his holdings of negatives.
Two interns have been appointed to the project, listing materials, and a Cardiff University-funded student will work at the Archive during the summer of 2010.
A book will be published by Photoworks in 2011.
Background
Daniel Meadows was one of a group of photographers trained at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s, who spearheaded the independent photography movement in Britain, breaking with tradition and infusing the medium with new energies and ways of seeing. The Manchester Poly group included Meadows, Martin Parr, Brian Griffin, Charlie Meecham and Peter Fraser. Inspired by Bill Jay’s touring lectures in the early 1970s, by material published in magazines such as ‘Creative Camera’ and ‘Album, by exhibitions such as Bill Brandt (Hayward Gallery 1970) Henri Cartier Bresson (V&A 1969) and by photography from the USA made by practitioners such as Diane Arbus, Walker Evans and Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, they were determined to establish a new ‘independent’ way of making and disseminating photographs, outside the traditional spheres of reportage. Meadows’ 1973 project the Free Photographic Omnibus during which he toured Britain in a double-decker bus, establishing free studios in towns and cities across the country) has received recognition; other work, such as June Street (1972) and Butlins by the Sea (1972), both in partnership with Martin Parr, the extraordinary Graeme Street Studio (1972), the Factory music series in the late 1970s and the virtually unknown’ Nattering in Paradise’ series (which, through interviews and photographs studied the lives of one middle-class community) have been little researched. As well as these named series, many thousands of photographs taken in the North West during the 1970s have been neither printed nor published.
In his 1975 book ‘Living Like This’, for which Meadows made both photographs and text, he combined photographs, oral history and writing to construct an elegy to ‘ordinary’ lives and evidenced his growing interest in narrative:
‘I hope that everyone who reads the stories will be able to enjoy a snatch of life as it is lived by someone else. For it is only by appreciating each other’s circumstances that we can hope to improve our world’ (Postscript, ‘Living Like This: Around Britain in the Seventies.’ 1975).’ Living Like This’, which was largely ignored when it was published, is a remarkable document, a combination of image, text and stories, which is unique in photographic production.
As much as his collaborator Martin Parr, Meadows was a radical photographer, both exploring the idea of the ‘ordinary’ and utilising street studio portraiture to produce a remarkable portrait of urban society in Britain in the 1970s and working, in the main, outside editorial or journalistic constraints. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he wrote about and interviewed his subjects.
This project continues Val Williams’ interest in British photography of this period; and. focuses on Meadows’ major projects -Graeme St Studio; June Street; Butlins by the Sea; Factory Records; the Free Photographic Omnibus and Nattering in Paradise.
Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr were also the only photographers from the independent grouping to work collaboratively- Parr and Meadows collaborated on June Street in the 1970s, and Meadows worked closely with oral historian Alan Dein in the 1990s. These partnerships will be explored.
Over the last fifteen years, Daniel Meadows has reflected on his work from the 1970s, and, before and during his PhD studies, embarked on an archaeology of the Free Photographic Omnibus. Although he had largely ceased to make documentary photographs by the beginning of the 1990s, Meadows remained intensely interested in the genre, and the publication of ‘National Portraits’ (1997) a selection of photographs from the Free Photographic Omnibus led Meadows on an intensive and highly personal research journey. Tracing the original portrait subjects, Meadows embarked upon an intensive exercise of oral history interviews (with Alan Dein) and re-photographing. His 2001 Book ‘The Bus’, was the result of this research. As an early instigator of ‘Digital Stories’ Meadows has become deeply involved in the exploration of the idea of performing and sharing autobiography and his own conference and seminar lectures exemplify these interests and mode of delivery.
The Daniel Meadows archive, held in his studio in Monmouth, is an almost complete record of his photographic practice and teaching and research career. It contains many thousands of negatives, which have not been printed, and the complete collection of published work as well as his archive of digital stories and his many writings and lectures. As one of the first lecturers on the Documentary Photography course at Newport College of Art, Meadows was a major protagonist of the teaching of documentary photography in the UK.
As a photographer, writer and digital storyteller, Meadows has produced practice, which is complex, passionate and sometimes deeply autobiographical. He has interrogated the idea of ‘documentary’ in a way that few of his photographic contemporaries have considered. The research, which I am proposing, will make Meadows’ work, and his photographic and research journey visible and intelligible to new and existing audiences.