Daniel Meadows

Book of the Road

Reviewed by Nick Hodgson FRPS

For readers of a certain age, 1974 may well bring back memories of flared jeans, platform heels and ABBA winning Eurovision. And whilst these are distant memories, on opening Daniel Meadows’ Book of the Road we are immediately transported back to this period, a kind of interregnum between post-Swinging Sixties pre-Thatcherite Britain struggling along in the face of rampant inflation, petrol rationing, power cuts, the three-day week and two general elections. Change was in the air, not all of it good, and it was in many ways an uneasy time for the nation - but ideal conditions for a documentary photographer to respond to.

Daniel Meadows’ approach was highly original and unconventional, yielding remarkable results at the time, whilst today providing us with an extraordinary window into a yester world. His book is also a relevant and informative body of work for social historians and younger generations of photography lovers.

His idea was simple enough – to create a mobile photographic studio in which he could travel the country for over a year and record people’s stories, process the film in the onboard makeshift darkroom and hand a free print to the sitter the very next day. Mobility came in the form of a double-decker bus, partly funded by the Arts Council and six regional arts associations for which Meadows then provided material for local exhibitions. The ‘Free Photographic Omnibus’ as he named it was born. From Wiltshire to Tyneside, he drove 10,000 miles, photographed 958 people, heard individual stories of both woe and positivity, and experienced remarkable acts of kindness from ordinary folk (and also, as it turned out, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant).

Once completed, Meadows’ work was exhibited at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts alongside a book, Living Like This (Arrow, 1975). 25 years later, a touring exhibition (how appropriate) of the images was shown at the then National Museum of Photography in Bradford and the Shoreditch Biennale. This prompted Meadows to try and find the very people he had photographed in Southampton, Hartlepool and Barrow-in-Furness. With the help of the local newspapers which ran ‘where are they now?’ articles to encourage people to step forward, he was able to meet up again with many of his sitters, record their stories and re-shoot them for what then turned into a book called The Bus (Harvill Press, 2001). Book of the Road brings these images together, with six gatefold sections of ‘then and now’ images and updates on how these lives have panned out.

The results are remarkable. He occasionally berates himself for not achieving the technical results he wished for. But his compositional eye and attention to detail of both the sitters (portraiture) and the events he attended (reportage including the World Marbles Championships, a Yard-of-Ale contest, Haafnet fishermen in the Solway Firth, and a medieval banquet) shines a warm and empathetic light on the British people and the curious eccentricities of regional cultures. Revisiting the locations in the late 90’s, he wrestled with what he describes as the central dilemma for all documentarists: are they ‘predator or collaborator’? On balance, with Book of the Road it’s the latter.

At 220 pages, with 150 monochrome images, the book is interspersed with fascinating diary entries, many of which have been transcribed from cassette tapes he recorded on the road. He is an accomplished wordsmith, as there is a visceral feel to his emotional state throughout the project. Sometimes lonely, other times meeting people who deeply touch his life through their own acts of generosity – like the café owner who gives him a £5 note (a lot of money in 1974!) simply because he loves what Meadows is doing. Given the socio-economic status of many of his subjects, there might have been the perception by some that Meadows was ‘posh’ (he was brought up on the estate of Dumbleton Hall in the north Cotswolds, coincidentally the family home of photographer Joan Leigh-Fermor). But his dislike of boarding school, and subsequent antidote in the form of Manchester Polytechnic with fellow photography students such as Brian Griffin and Martin Parr, allowed him in his words to ‘give people half a chance … and they’ll show you the beauty of the human soul’. He decided to work ‘with people, not doing media to them’.

The result is that Book of the Road is up there as one of the most important post-war British socio-documentary photography books. It accompanies the excellent exhibition currently in the downstairs gallery at the Centre for British Photography in central London, which is well worth a visit. Whilst you are there, thumb through the copy of the 1967 Reader’s Digest AA Book of the Road to contextualise the physical format of Book of the Road - the attention to detail of which is a great credit to the thoughtful work of designer Tom Booth Woodger and Bluecoat Press.