On the Road with the Free Photographic Omnibus around 1970s Britain

In spring of 1970, Daniel Mead­ows saw the Bill Brandt exhi­bi­tion at the Hay­ward Gallery in Lon­don. The pho­tog­ra­phy show proved a pow­er­ful turn­ing point in the British teen’s life.

“I was eigh­teen and I’d been locked away in board­ing schools for ten years. I hadn’t thrived. All I’d learnt was that the price of a ​‘priv­i­leged’ edu­ca­tion was mea­sured in com­pet­i­tive­ness, cru­el­ty and mus­cu­lar Chris­tian­i­ty,” Mead­ows says. ​“Brandt’s pho­tographs showed me that there was anoth­er world; and it was one I want­ed to be in.”

Draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from Irv­ing Penn’s ​‘Worlds in a Small Room’, Mead­ows opened his first pop­-up stu­dio in Manchester’s Moss Side dur­ing the spring of 1972, where he honed his prac­tice mak­ing por­traits and record­ing people’s stories.

Recog­nis­ing the pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dio was not an inher­ent­ly sta­t­ic place, Mead­ows put the project on wheels, using the cam­era as a com­pass to guide him into oth­er worlds. He pur­chased a red low bridge deck­er bus for £360 (£3,800 today) and dubbed it the ​“Free Pho­to­graph­ic Omnibus” as a nod to the Latin term ​“for all the people”.

On Sep­tem­ber 22, 1973, Mead­ows set off from York on a 10,000-mile jour­ney across Eng­land over 14 months, pho­tograph­ing 958 peo­ple and pro­vid­ing each with a free print.

“In the evening, after the day’s por­trait ses­sion was over, I’d start up the gen­er­a­tor, go into my dark­room aboard the bus and make the prints. This often meant that I didn’t get to bed until after mid­night,” he remem­bers. ​“Next day, peo­ple would return to col­lect their pho­tographs and that would pro­vide me with an oppor­tu­ni­ty for yet more conversation.”

Mead­ows record­ed con­ver­sa­tions with the peo­ple he met, keep­ing a jour­nal of his expe­ri­ences. When the series was com­plete, he exhib­it­ed and pub­lished Liv­ing Like This in 1975. Now he returns to where it all began with the recent pub­li­ca­tion of Book of the Road (Blue­coat Press), bring­ing togeth­er the por­traits, pho­to reportage, inter­views, and trav­el notes for the first time.

“By engi­neer­ing a stream of ran­dom encoun­ters with strangers I dis­cov­ered just how many inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions there were to be had,” Mead­ows says. ​“Orig­i­nal­ly I made audio record­ings so that I could be sure of accu­rate cap­tion infor­ma­tion. But they soon turned into more than that. When the dig­i­tal age arrived, I dis­cov­ered that — by using non­linear video edit­ing — I could realise the ambi­tion of years and com­bine the sounds with the pho­tographs. Sud­den­ly I was mak­ing mul­ti­me­dia son­nets, from the people.”

In one pas­sage, Mead­ows includes a con­ver­sa­tion with ​“Angry Man” whose main busi­ness is prop­er admon­ish­ment. ​“I don’t want my pho­to­graph thank you but keep these chil­dren off the car park it’s dan­ger­ous,” Angry Man har­rumphs at the end of the conversation.

But more often then not, peo­ple were keen to col­lab­o­rate. Mead­ows kept it short and sweet: ​“I used to tell peo­ple two things: ​‘I’m gonna put you in the his­to­ry books’; and ​‘I’m only going to take one pic­ture, so let’s make it a good one’.”

Daniel Mead­ows’ Book of the Road is out now pub­lished by Blue­coat Press.

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