Daniel Meadows

Daniel Meadows is an English photographer turned maker of digital stories, and a teacher of photography turned teacher of participatory media.

Life and career as photographer

Meadows was born in Great Washbourne, Gloucestershire, "in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Cotswolds", on 28 January 1952. Both of his parents had Suffolk origins; his father was a land agent for the Dumbleton Estate, in which the family lived; his mother developed multiple sclerosis when Daniel was young and this gradually became more acute. He spent his early years without television.^[1]

With Peter Fraser, Brian Griffin, Charlie Meecham and Martin Parr, Meadows studied at Manchester Polytechnic.^[2] (Meadows' 1972 series June Street was a collaboration with Parr.)

Meadows was living in the Moss Side area of Manchester during termtime, and was aware of its impending demolition. With its many small shops, Moss Side might, he thought, support a "picture shop", so he rented a barber's on Greame Street from January 1972, inviting people to come in to have their photographs taken for no charge. Two months later he had run out of money and had to close but had gained useful experience.^[3]

Inspired by what Bill Jay had told him of Benjamin Stone's travel around Britain by horse-drawn caravan, Meadows thought of a mobile version of the Greame Street studio. He worked at Butlin's Holiday Camp at Filey during summer 1972 to pay for the publicity materials with which he hoped to get Arts Council and other funding for the purchase and one year's use of a double-decker bus.^[4] He succeeded and for 14 months from September 1973 travelled around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus,^[2] a Leyland PD1 bus whose seats had been removed to make space for a darkroom and living quarters: its windows were used as the gallery.^[5] Some of this work was published in Meadows' first book, Living Like This (1975), which combined Meadows' photographs and text with first-person accounts of those he had talked with.^[2]

Among the photographs of this series is Portsmouth: John Payne, aged 12, with two friends and his pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974.^[6] Payne, holding his pigeon in the centre of the photograph, told Meadows that he caught and bred pigeons.^[7] Paul Cabuts writes that:

The photograph, like many other photographs in the exhibition [No Such Thing as Society], offers a window on a lost world, one that is difficult to perceive without considerable culturally-specific contextualisation. Meadows’ photograph is however a masterstroke in providing clues about the life and times of those recorded through his lens. The boys became the subject, although the pigeon had been the vehicle for this particular engagement. In offering up their pigeon (the photograph was taken at their request), we enter a world of friendship and pride, the social activities on a working class housing estate. . . .^[8]

With its echo of Ken Loach's film Kes, the photograph was widely reproduced.^[9] It was the cover photograph of the 1975 Arts Council anthology British Image 1 and the photograph on the poster for and catalogue of the 2008 travelling Hayward exhibition No Such Thing as Society.

Meadows went on to photograph the northwest of England and Factory Records in the 1970s and to study the people of a middle-class London suburb in the 1980s, the latter published as Nattering in Paradise.^[2]

Career as teacher and digital storyteller

Meadows taught in the Documentary Photography course at Newport College of Art and Design; from 1994 he has taught at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.^[10] His students there have included Tim Hetherington.^[11] In the 1990s, he led photojournalism workshops for the Reuters Foundation, the British Council, and other organizations in Europe and the Indian subcontinent.^[12]

Meadows' interest in digital storytelling was greatly influenced by, successively, Pedro Meyer's I Photograph to Remember, Meyer's ZoneZero website, and the NextExit website of Dana Atchley of the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) at UCB. Meadows taught an undergraduate course titled "Digital Storytelling and Photography" and also contemplated ways of adding digital storytelling to the website he was building about the Free Photographic Omnibus and the later lives of the people this had depicted. Meadows corresponded with Dana Atchley and arranged to attend one of the "boot camps" held by Atchley, Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen. Atchley was too ill to appear, but at the camp and a subsequent event at Ben Lomond he learned and exchanged ideas.^[13]

From 2001 to 2006 Meadows was creative director of Capture Wales, a BBC Wales project: "[he] accomplished an innovative reworking of the Californian [CDS] model, adapting it to the 'media ecology' of UK public broadcasting".^[14]

Since this time Meadows has also lectured widely about digital storytelling.^[12]

Selected exhibitions

• "The Other Britain." National Theatre (London), and touring in Britain, 1982.^[15]
• "National Portraits: Now and Then." Irish Gallery of Photography (Dublin), 2000. (Solo exhibition.)^[16]
• "The British Are Coming." Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), 2007. With Chris Coekin and Tony Ray-Jones.^[17]
• "How We Are: Photographing Britain from the 1840s to the Present." Tate Britain (London), 2007.^[18][19]
• "No Such Thing as Society." Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 2008. Tullie House (Carlisle); Ujazdów Castle (Warsaw); 2008–2010.^[20]
• "Projections of Reality." Red October (Moscow), 2010. Meadows contributed "The Photobus".^[21]
• "The Other Britain Revisited: Photographs from New Society." Victoria and Albert Museum (London), 2010.^[15]
• "Cameras in the Community" (Fotonow). Plymouth Arts Centre, 2010. With Camper Obscura, Laundrette Residencies and South West Graduate Photography Prize.^[22]
• "Daniel Meadows: Early Photographic Works." National Media Museum (Bradford), 2011.^[23]

Permanent collections

• Victoria and Albert Museum (London)^[24]
• Birmingham Central Library^[25]

Publications

Books of work by Meadows

• Daniel Meadows. Living Like This: Around Britain in the Seventies. London: Arrow, 1975. ISBN 0099114003.
• Daniel Meadows. Nattering in Paradise: A Word from the Suburbs. London: Simon & Schuster, 1988. ISBN 0671698907. With Sara Tibbetts.
• Daniel Meadows. Set Pieces: Being about Film Stills Mostly. London: BFI, 1993. ISBN 0851703895, ISBN 0851703909.
• Daniel Meadows. National Portraits: Photographs from the 1970s. Edited by Val Williams. Salford: Viewpoint Photography Gallery; Derby: Montage Gallery, 1997. ISBN 0901952818.
• Daniel Meadows. The Bus: The Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973–2001: An Adventure in Documentary. London: Harvill, 2001. ISBN 186046842X.
• Val Williams. Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s. Photoworks, 2011. ISBN 1903796466.

Other appearances

• British Image 1: Photographs by Homer Sykes, Claire Schwob, John Myers, Daniel Meadows, Bryn Campbell, Roslyn Banish, Ian Dobbie, and Paul Carter. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975. Meadows' "The Free Photographic Omnibus" appears on pp. 38–49.
• Julian Bream: A Life on the Road. London: Macdonald, 1982. ISBN 0356078809. About the lutenist Julian Bream. Text by Tony Palmer, photographs by Meadows.
• God in Wales Today: Religion in a Cathedral Town. The Newport Survey 6. Newport: Gwent College of Higher Education, 1986. ISBN 0950731757. Edited by Meadows.
• Education: The 5 Rs: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, Right, Rong: A Photographic Survey of Education in Newport. The Newport Survey 8. Newport: Gwent College of Higher Education, 1988. ISBN 0950731773. Edited by Meadows.
• Love Stories. Granta 68. New York: Granta, 1999. ISBN 0964561182. Ed. Ian Jack. Includes "Then and Now" by Meadows.

Awards

• BAFTA Cymru Award, 2002, for Capture Wales.^[12]
• Honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, 2008.^[26]

Notes

1. ^ The Bus, 63–67; Meadows' description of Great Washbourne is on p.65.
2. ^ ^{a b c d} "The Daniel Meadows Archives", PARC Projects, Photography Archive Research Centre. Accessed 2010-10-07.
3. ^ Daniel Meadows, Living Like This, pp. 9–10.
4. ^ Meadows, Living Like This, p.12; David Allan Mellor, No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–87: From the British Council and the Arts Council Collection (London: Hayward, 2007; ISBN 978-1-85332-265-5), p.32.
5. ^ Meadows, Living Like This, pp. 14, 16.
6. ^ The title has been given in various forms; this is how it appears on the copyright page and p.32 of No Such Thing as Society (2007).
7. ^ British Image 1, p.40 (the photograph appears opposite, and is titled John Payne from Portsmouth, aged 12); Living Like This, p.61 (the photograph appears on the same page, and, like many in the book, is not given a title).
8. ^ Paul Cabuts, "Three boys and a pigeon: Photography in Wales", Planet 196. Reproduced here on Cabuts' site. Accessed 2010-11-03.
9. ^ David Alan Mellor, No Such Thing as Society, p.32.
10. ^ David Alan Mellor, No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–1987: From the British Council and the Arts Council Collection (London: Hayward Publishing, 2007; ISBN 978-1-85332-265-5), 217.
11. ^ Tim Hetherington, "The Big Issue", Source. Accessed 2010-11-01.
12. ^ ^{a b c} Potted biography, "Artists", Projections of Reality. Accessed 2010-11-01.
13. ^ Daniel Meadows, "The Electric Engagement", pp. 94–96 within Daniel Meadows and Jenny Kidd, "Capture Wales: The BBC Digital Storytelling Project; in John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam, eds, Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2009; ISBN 978-1-4051-8059-7), pp. 91–117.; Therese Nolan-Brown, "Digital storytelling at QUT: A survey of digital storytelling projects and activities" (PDF), Queensland University of Technology, 10 May 2008. Accessed 2010-11-03.
14. ^ John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam, "Computational Power Meets Human Contact", in Hartley and McWilliam, eds, Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World, p.6.
15. ^ ^{a b} "The Other Britain Revisited: Photographs from New Society", Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010. Accessed 2010-05-02.
16. ^ List of past exhibitions, Irish Gallery of Photography. Accessed 2010-10-30
17. ^ Exhibition notice, Stephen Bulger Gallery. David Balzer, "The Prince of Tides", Toronto Life, January 2007. Both accessed 1 November 2010.
18. ^ Blake Morrison, "Think of England", Guardian, 19 May 2007. Accessed 2010-01-22.
19. ^ Benjamin Secher, "Portraits of a strange land", Daily Telegraph, 14 May 2007. Accessed 2010-01-22.
20. ^ Press release for the exhibition, British Council. Accessed 15 February 2009. Jon Savage, "Tories, turmoil and tank tops", The Guardian, 24 March 2008.
21. ^ List of projects, Projections of Reality. Карина Абдусаламова, "Проекции реальности: столкновения с (не)знакомым", Vostok Inform. "Негатив в шоколаде", Kommersant. All accessed 2010-11-01.
22. ^ Exhibition announcement (PDF), Fotonow. Exhibition announcement, Plymouth Arts Centre. Both accessed 2010-11-01.
23. ^ Liz Jobey, "Street life", Financial Times, 2 September 2011. Accessed 2011-11-03.
24. ^ Search results, Victoria and Albert Museum.
25. ^ "The Art Fund helps Birmingham Central Library secure important photographic legacy for the nation", the Art Fund, 10 February 2009.
26. ^ "Daniel Meadows awarded RPS Fellowship", Cardiff School of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies, 22 September 2008. Accessed 2010-11-01.

External links

• Daniel Meadows' site
• Daniel Meadows at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
• Capture Wales.
  • Original site with videos in Real Media format
  • Newer site with videos in Flash format (together with other material)
• Frost, Thomas. "Joy Division and Daniel Meadows". 4ortherecord.com.
• Meadows, Daniel. "Introduction to Digital Storytelling" BBC Wales.
• Meadows, Daniel, Lisa Heledd, and Carwyn Evans. "How Public Broadcasting Serves the Public Interest in the Digital Age" (PDF). Transcript of a paper presented to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on 5 February 2006.
• Steele, Heather Louise. "Cameras, Joy Division and a Double-Decker Bus...".

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Name	Meadows, Daniel
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Date of birth	1952
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