28 4 April 2020 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
DA N I E L M E A D OWS
the Free Photographic
Omnibus – the work for which
he is perhaps best known and
associated – came into being.
Spending the whole of his last
year at college fundraising for the
project, he eventually managed to
scrape together enough to convert
an old bus, and put together an
itinerary visiting towns where he’d
received funding from local arts
associations. At each stop, he’d
invite people in, take their portrait,
give it to them to keep and leave
behind an exhibition.
Direction
I’m curious to know if he offered
any kind of direction to his subjects.
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been
pushed by not having enough
money, or the right camera, or being
caught in the moment of being with
a stranger who’s becoming
engaging. I’d have loved to shoot an
entire roll of film per person, but I
didn’t have the funds. In order to
dry film when I lived in the bus, I
had to drive it around to get the
engine warm enough to puff air
into the drying cabinet, with the
film swinging about. I washed the
film in public lavatories, so I
always cut my cloth according to
what’s possible.’
He tells me his biggest regret is
not being able to track down those
exhibition prints now. ‘I made these
beautiful exhibitions with captions,
and now I can’t find them all – I
made two copies of everything, but
mine went into the windows of the
bus and they all got condensation
damage so I took them down.
Wouldn’t it be great if readers of
Amateur Photographer could help
me track them down and find where
they have been stored. There’s
Southern Arts, South West Arts,
East Midlands, West Midlands,
Yorkshire that I can’t find.’
It’s clear that having a meaningful
archive is of utmost importance to
Daniel, which is where his most
recent book, Now and Then:
England 1970-2015 comes into play.
The book coincides with the
acquisition of his collection by the
revered Bodleian Library in Oxford.
A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in
2013 placed extra urgency on
sorting his lifetime’s work.
Val Williams, a well-known
curator, came to Daniel’s studio,
with a view to putting on a
retrospective – but she couldn’t find
her way around the archive. Later,
Pete James from the Library of
Birmingham said they wanted the