I do love a wildly ambitious photographic project, and they don't come much wilder than Daniel Meadows' decision to drop £360 on a double-decker bus, kit it out as a mobile living space and darkroom and then spend more than a year driving the length and breadth of the country taking and distributing images. Many of those pictures have now been collected together in a forthcoming Bluecoat publication called Book Of The Road, and a sample can be perused here.
Meadows was just 21 at the time, newly graduated from Manchester Polytechnic, where he and Martin Parr had produced their remarkable front-room family portraits of those living on June Street in Salford. If that project had very narrow geographical parameters, the same was certainly not true of what he did next.
I'd imagine that many of those he encountered on his travels were pleased to have their portraits taken (and receive a free copy) but nevertheless rather bemused by Meadows' interest. Half a century on, his politically and ethically motivated decision to document ordinary people going about their daily lives has bequeathed us a revealing snapshot of a modernising nation emerging from the post-war years.
2 comments:
Hi Ben -- sorry to not be leaving a comment related to the post in question, but I haven't been able to dig up an email address. I loved your live review of Richard Dawson's Ruby Cord show earlier this year and was wondering if I could tempt you to join a kind of digital roundtable about that album. Over the past year it's become one of my absolute favorites of all time (top ten, no question) and one of the reasons is the amazing lyrical richness. I've seen so little serious discussion / analysis of the album's lyrics, especially as compared to all the discussion that goes on inside my head, and so I got to wondering whether I could do something to remedy that. I've been looking up writers who have expressed appreciation for the album that sounds as deep and passionate as mine, and reaching out. What I think would be cool is if we all used some kind of messaging app to talk over each of the songs in detail -- particularly the lyrics, but of course not limited to that. And after the fact, I'd edit it all into some kind of shape for a song-by-song series I could post to a modest music blog of my own (small readership, but it'd be somewhere to share the fruits of the conversation!). If this sounds interesting, please get in touch!
Hi, thanks for getting in touch - and for your kind words about the review. Yes, that sounds like it might be of interest!
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