Daniel Meadows: Free Photographic Omnibus - Portraits 1973–1974

Softcover | 14 X 20 cm | 36 pp

Café Royal Books | 2024

In 1972, as a student at Manchester Polytechnic, I began experimenting with ways of doing documentary work with people, not to them. That spring, in the city's Moss Side district, I opened a free photographic shop where I ran weekly portrait sessions for passers-by. I found this way of working as agreeable as the pictures it produced and made up my mind to extend the project by putting it on wheels. First, though, I needed money.

Much of the next year I spent crowdfunding, securing sponsors and applying for grants but, by September 1973, my Free Photographic Omnibus was ready. At its heart was a 1948 Leyland Titan PD1 double-decker bus which I had bought for £360 and repurposed — somewhat crudely for there was never enough money — as my home, gallery and darkroom. Over the next fourteen months I covered 10,000 miles and visited twenty-two towns and cities. 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.

The decades passed. Then, in 1997, my bus pictures were 'rediscovered' by the curator Val Williams who created National Portraits, Photographs from the 1970s by Daniel Meadows, a travelling exhibition which opened at Viewpoint, Salford, and it is from Williams's edit of 110 pictures that I have made the selection published here. Daniel Meadows 2024