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In July 1973, 21 year old Daniel Meadows, fresh out of art school, bought a double-decker bus for £360 and set off round England in search of ordinary people to photograph. In the course of a 14-month journey, he offered free portrait sessions in 22 different towns, developing black and white prints in a darkroom he had contrived inside the bus, in which he also lived. He photographed a total of 958 people, alone or in groups, the majority of whom remained anonymous and collected their free portrait the following day.
A quarter of a century later Meadows came across the bus photographs in his archive and was struck by how fresh they were. After they were exhibited and appeared in a magazine, he began to wonder what had happened to the people in the pictures. With the help of the local press in Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool and Southampton, he went in search of them. Many could not be found, others had died, but a number of people turned up to be re-photographed.
The juxtaposition of their past and present selves in this astonishing adventure in documentary makes for a powerful pictorial history of the changing face of England, the vagaries of fashion and the ravages of time. Meadows interviewed the sitters, ordinary people from varied walks of life, who talked candidly about their lives, their friends, their loves, their families and what the felt the future held – providing a moving commentary to Meadow’s own evocative journey through time. A selection of the photographs from 1973 and 2001 are viewable on The Photobus website
, along with Meadows interviews with the sitters. A book containing all the interviews and photraphs is available from The Harvill Press, London
Daniel is currently at the BBC where he is working on a Digital Storytelling project he developed at Cardiff University and also in California. He has trained up four teams of workshop facilitators who are out on the road in England and Wales. The teams teach members of the public, in portable computer workshops, how to make short films for
broadcast and the web. Ten people at a time. These are table-top
productions which make wide use of still pictures, that "invisible nation"
which hides in our photo albums. Daniel sometimes calls this project, "Scrapbook
TV". The stories themselves can be seen on the web at
www.bbc.co.uk/capturewales
and on BBC Wales (Friday evenings), on BBC 2W (Wednesday evenings, it's a
digital service which you can pick up on satellite) and (shortly) on local
television in the north of England. The English teams, currently in the
"pilot" stage, operate out of Hull and Blackburn. You can find Daniel’s "story of
the moment"
here:
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
"...to thrill those who stand and listen with the notion that they, too,
might have a voice."
The Bus rolls on.
DANIEL MEADOWS
