1 minute read
DANIEL MEADOWS
“Oh my goodness! I had no idea that my spell in Hull would revisit me like this after such a time… I worked at Humberside College of Higher Education from 1981 to 83. I wanted to teach because my own experience of schooling had been very poor and, after working as a photographer and television researcher, meeting people from all walks of life, I felt I had a contribution to make.” And what a contribution!
Daniel not only affected the lives and work of the photographers featured here, as teacher and mentor, but many others with his powerful generous approach which he describes as: "Make it a daily habit to engage with strangers and treat people as individuals, never as types”.
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Daniel worked directly in the communities he found himself in. Often setting up free photo studios capturing people during their everyday life. “In the late 1990s, I was curious to find out what had happened to those I’d photographed from the Free Photographic Omnibus [a converted London double decker], so I persuaded the editors of local newspapers in three of the towns I’d visited, to run ‘where are they now?’ features, inviting readers to identify themselves and to be interviewed and pictured again. This work developed and twenty years after leaving Hull, I returned to the city as part of my lifelong endeavour to enable/educate people to take control of the way they are represented by the media — I devised a travelling community digital storytelling project called Telling Lives. It ran from 2003 to 2005 and was led by local Hull people."
Daniel was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012, meaning he now makes very little new work, but focuses on showing his archive internationally. "MS doesn’t stop me and I’m still fascinated by the work of photographers like Bill Brandt, who seemed to use his camera like a passport to slip between the social classes; David Hurn, who I began working with after I left Hull - he was truly inspiring. And Chris Killip who said "Photography is not what interest me, it's the subject matter that interests me."
