Commanding views: from the Library of Birmingham’s public gallery
On show: A high-tech advertising board gives details of Daniel Meadows’ exhibition
Eye-catching exterior: the Library of Birmingham, which opened in 2013
Photographer’s entire works to be presented to library archive Report: SHONA WALL Images: STEWART WALL StewartWall.com
“His work touched us at the time and it touches us still”
H
OW MANY times have you watched a TV antiques show and thought, “I used to have one of those”?
Most of us go through life without a thought about our place in history. We don’t think that one day we might enter a museum and see on show the type of crockery we used, or the chairs we sat on, or the clothes we wore. If we preserved all our todays for tomorrows, we would probably run out of storage space. If you have been a photographer for a long time, you might be thinking to yourself that the negs you shot as a teenager are probably up in the attic somewhere. Or it could be you know for certain that they are not, because they all got damaged in
Testing, testing: Jack Meadows adjusts the microphone for Professor Val Williams
In good spirits: Daniel Meadows delivers his speech with characteristic dry wit
that leak you had five years ago. One remarkable feature of photographer Daniel Meadows is that he always had a sense of his place in history. “When you are
took sound recordings of the people he photographed too. He wrote a book about his experiences: Living Like This: Around Britain in the Seventies, and has
having your photograph taken, you are looking into the faces of your great-grandchildren,” he told me once. Daniel is best known for his
tour of Britain in the 1970s on a double decker bus. He lived on the bus and photographed more than 900 people around Britain in a 14-month tour. He
had that work – and many more - exhibited numerous times. Daniel, who has also worked for the BBC and has been a longtime lecturer of photography
at Newport, has revisited his Photographic Omnibus project several times in his lifetime. But one aspect of the project was always immediately apparent, and
that was his talent for documentation from the very beginning. It was as though he always knew that history would add weight upon the value of his capacity for detail. He has always been a remarkable photographer, but he is also a remarkable historian. He credits two other photographers as being his inspiration. One was Tony Ray-Jones, who died in 1972 aged 30, the other was Sir John Benjamin Stone, a Birmingham MP and photographer who died in 1914. Benjamin Stone made a comprehensive photographic record Continued on Page 2