24 4 April 2020 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113

eyes

Above: A contact

sheet from the Free

Photographic

Omnibus, shot in

Barrow-in-Furness,

November 1974.

With little funding,

film was not

expended on

shooting each of

the subjects more

than once

DA N I E L M E A D OWS

M

y own association

with Daniel

Meadows goes back

many years to when

I was a fresh-faced young student

eager to undertake his Digital

Storytelling module at Cardiff

Journalism School (known as

JOMEC) in the mid 2000s. Alas, as

it was limited to only 25 students, I

wasn’t early enough in the queue to

make it. Having been following his

work for some years previously, the

disappointment was palpable.

Later, on returning to JOMEC for

a postgraduate diploma, there was

Daniel again. This time giving a

lecture as part of a series given by

industry experts who mostly told us

that the business we were all keenly

about to enter was on its last legs.

Although details of the exact

content of Daniel’s lecture remain

somewhat hazy, his enthusiasm and

delivery remain firmly fixed in my

mind – as well as his hope that we

were not in fact, all doomed.

Almost 15 years later at the end of

2019, while on a brief break in West

Wales, I sat with Daniel’s latest

book on my lap and flicked on the

television for background noise. To

my surprise and amusement at the

coincidence, there he was again in a

segment of The One Show, talking

about the exhibition that coincided

with the book’s publication.

It’s a few months later again when

I finally get to meet the man himself

when he kindly invites me into his

home in Monmouth. Plonking

myself down on the sofa and

promptly furnished with a cup of

tea and a jar of biscuits, we start a

chat that would end 12,000 words

later (according to the word count of

the transcription it will take me a

day to complete).

Newport

I tell Daniel I’m due to meet his

friend and former colleague David

Hurn a couple of weeks later and

that starts us off on a tangent about

the famous documentary

photography course at Newport

that David started and Daniel

taught on in the 1980s and 1990s.

It ran as a BTEC and was

intended as a way to teach students

For

Cataloguing a vast and extensive archive,

like that of documentary photographer

Daniel Meadows, gave new meaning to

his life’s work, as Amy Davies finds out

not only the fundamentals of

photographic technique, but how to

actually make a living from it. He

explains, ‘We had kids from YTS

(Youth Training Schemes), middle-

aged people who were fed up having

been made redundant, regular

higher education students who’d

done well at art subjects at school

and were excited by photography, as

well as those who used it as a kind

of postgraduate course after

attending some of the best

unborn

yet