Daniel Meadows
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Portraits from the Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973-1974

Building on the documentary work I did with the Shop on Greame Street, I decided to put my project on wheels and spent a large part of 1973 securing sponsors and applying for grants, crowdfunding we'd call it today. By the autumn, the Free Photographic Omnibus was ready.

It was a 1948 Leyland Titan PD1 double-decker, registration JRR 404. I bought it for £360 and, somewhat crudely for my skills were limited and there was never enough money, I repurposed it as my home, gallery and darkroom. Over the next fourteen months I covered 10,000 miles and visited twenty-two villages, towns and cities across England.

Parked up in shopping centres and on high streets I ran free portrait sessions for all-comers, developing their pictures overnight and giving them prints the next day. I photographed 958 people.

Incorporating these portraits with the many reportage photographs I made while on the road, I used the facilities at Manchester Polytechnic (where I was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies) to create a number of regional exhibitions. When the journey was over I pulled these together into one large exhibition that launched at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in October 1975 to coincide with the publication of my first book Living Like This (Arrow).

Two decades later the curator Val Williams revisited my bus pictures. Separating the portraits from the works of reportage, she created National Portraits, Photographs from the 1970s by Daniel Meadows, a book and travelling exhibition (pictured) which opened at Viewpoint, Salford in 1997. It is from Williams's edit that I present the selection here.

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Portraits from the Free Photographic Omnibus

Portraits from the Free Photographic Omnibus


Photographs of the Bus

Photographs of the Bus


 

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Bodleian Libraries Links

Bodleian Libraries | Archive of Daniel Meadows, photographer and social documentarist (CMD ID 12752, 17418, 17823, 18768) | Meadows' photographic archive of negatives and contact sheets, 1969-1986, Nov 2014

Bus A Yorkshire, 22 Sep-31 Oct 1973

Bus B East Midlands, 29 Nov 1973-19 Jan 1974

Bus C West Midlands, 3 Feb-20 Mar 1974

Bus D South, with papers, colour negatives and prints of Penrith Avenue, Sale, Cheshire, 12 Apr-15 May 1974

Bus E South, with negatives and contacts of the bus by Allan Andrew, 18 May - 29 Jun 1974, 18 May 2002

Bus F Great Washbourne and South West (part 1), 30 Jun-25 Jul 1974

Bus G South West (part 2), 25 Jul-25 Aug 1974

Bus H North East, Sep-Nov 1974

Also:
Bodleian Libraries | Archive of Daniel Meadows, photographer and social documentarist (CMD ID 12752, 17418.17823) | Free Photographic Omnibus project, Mar 1972-4 Sep 2020, n.d.

 

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Contact Daniel Meadows

Email: daniel@photobus.co.uk

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