Daniel Meadows was fortunate to come to photography in the short period when the UK Arts Council actually supported photographers rather than galleries and curators in 1975 work from his ‘The Free Photographic Omnibus’ was among that by 8 UK photographers features in their ‘British Image 1’. The series was meant to be published twice a year, and most if not all of the photographers featured had received grants under a scheme started by the Arts Council in 1973, including Meadows. The series didn’t last long, nor did the grants.
His portraits from this project, taking pictures of people as he toured the country in a double-decker bus which served as living space, free studio and mobile gallery provided an idiosyncratic cross-section of the country, largely from people who would otherwise only have appeared in family albums rather than those who might attract media attention.
This month’s Life Force online magazine has a good feature on this work, Living Like This, with text and pictures by Meadows.
More work from the UK in the 1970s appears in the book ‘Strangely Familiar‘ by Peter Mitchell, published in 2013. I think the edition was a fairly small one and the book is now hard to find, particularly since his work was shown at Arles this year.
You can also read about Mitchell and his work in various online newspaper articles, including The Independent and a recent article in The Guardian.
Although many of us took pictures in colour in the 1970s, Mitchell was one of the earliest to work consistently in colour as a documentary photographer and his show A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission at the Impressions Gallery in York in 1979 was, as Martin Parr notes “was the first colour show, at a British photographic gallery, by a British photographer.
Personally I was rather put off by the extraordinary presentation, with the work mounted on space charts and the conceit that these represented the view of an alien from Mars who had just landed in Leeds, where Mitchell’s day job was driving around the city making deliveries – with a step-ladder in the back of the van from which he made the pictures. It was for me a barrier to seeing the true documentary value of his images, as too was the sometimes rather odd colour rendition of his prints at that time.
But it was a show that I think inspired Martin Parr to make his move from black and white to colour, or at least persuaded him that the time was ripe and that serious photographic work in colour – which he was familiar with from Eggleston and Shore in the USA – could now be acceptable at the rather stuffier UK galleries.
