THE BUS

 

PART ONE

Beginnings

IN 1973 ALL my hopes were invested in a bus. I wanted it – no, I expected it – to make a difference.

The Free Photographic Omnibus was (and continues to be) an adventure in documentary photography that I began in 1973 when I was 21 years old and living in Manchester. For three years I had studied photography at the art college of the polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University.

As a photographer my principal subject matter was – and remains – the English people. I’m not interested in celebrities, just ordinary folk. In 1973 I was an incipient hippie, contemptuous of “straight” society. Like many of my generation I grew my hair long and wore my bell-bottoms wide. I wanted to explore “alternative” ways of living. I genuinely believed that by doing so I might be able to help change the world.

The Great Ordinary Show

THERE WERE A lot of buses about in the 1960s. The Who sang about a “Magic Bus” (“Too much, Magic Bus!”).¹ Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, drove across America with his gang of Merry Pranksters in a school bus with DESTINATION FURTHUR (sic) written on it, playing Bob Dylan from speakers mounted on the roof and encouraging people to take LSD – an idea subsequently ripped off by The Beatles who went on a tacky Magical Mystery Tour of their own.

Far and away the best bus trip of the 1960s was the film Summer Holiday² (I saw it at the Essoldo cinema in Evesham when I was eleven), in which Cliff Richard as Don the London Transport bus driver travelled across Europe with Una Stubbs and The Shadows in a double-decker they had converted themselves.

Did this film, as Ray Harris has suggested, kick-start British youth culture?

Dear Cliff Richard,

Can bus journeys change the world? When you and The Shadows and Una Stubbs set off back in the ’sixties on your Summer Holiday, you set more than a double-decker in motion.

Summer Holiday was not just a film, it was also an allegory – one so powerful it entered deep into the psyche of a nation’s youth, spawning a culture that has grown to threaten the very fabric of society. Never mind Clockwork Orange, you and your Summer Holiday have a lot to answer for.

What was your message to the youth of a golden era of economic expansion? What did you say to Una and the “Shads” that was an abreaction for change? You said: “Hey, you guys, we’re gonna run our own show now.” The message couldn’t be clearer. We, the youth of this country, without parental permission, are taking control of our own lives, taking control of the double-decker bus, and going off to have a good time. And instead of ending up with a good clip round the ear from the local bobby, you did, in fact, have a good time and get away with it. Never mind Catcher in the Rye, where were the censor’s scissors when Summer Holiday was released? It was subversion in bus conductor’s clothing.³

My Free Photographic Omnibus was dedicated to valuing ordinary people, treating them as individuals not as types. Dylan sang that he did not want to “analyse, categorise, finalise or advertise” the girl in his song “All I Really Want To Do”. And that was what I wanted for the passengers on my bus. They would be self-selecting, never categorised or pegged-out in some ethnographer’s glass case, never compared against the entries in a lexicon of social anthropology, not (at the time) even named. But they were treasured. When it came to deciding who to photograph I rejected traditional methods of journalistic research and chose to “take what I could gather from coincidence”. Dylan had it right.

I bought my 1948 double-decker for £360.20, a Leyland Titan PD1. It was to be the only 55-seater ever to carry 958 passengers. I financed the project with £3,500. That’s about £23,000 in today’s money. It was raised through sponsorship from industry, personal donations and, in time, two grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain. The journey started in York on 22 September 1973 and ended, 10,000 miles later, in Barrow-in-Furness on 2 November 1974.

Casting my net wide, I developed a strategy that relied on the offer of a free portrait. I hoped that, having had their picture taken, people would then invite me into their homes, or their places of work or leisure, where I could make important works of photo-reportage that would eventually form my grand statement. And while I was out making photographs, the bus would still work for me because I could display the pictures I had made in its windows. It was to be a gallery space as well as a mobile home and darkroom.

The free bus portraits were to be both a present and a passport into other people’s lives. The fact that I made no charge for them would, I hoped, give the Free Photographic Omnibus some credibility as a “community art” project with those who sat on the committees of the regional arts associations from whom I sought funding.

That was the idea and, for the most part, it worked.

During the 14 months when I lived on the bus I ran free portrait sessions in 22 different locations, from Southampton in the south to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north, photographing 958 people.

Each evening I would develop the films in my makeshift darkroom and the subjects of these black and white prints would come by the bus to pick up their free portraits the next day. I displayed my pictures in the windows and was filmed for television and mentioned in the newspapers. The Daily Mirror, then Britain’s biggest circulation newspaper, called it “The Great Ordinary Show.”⁴

I liked that.

My darkroom, at the rear of the top-deck.

The irony of all this is that, although I did produce an exhibition and indeed a book in 1975 – both of them called Living Like This⁵ – it is not the pictures that were published and exhibited then, the ones I considered to be my “serious work”, that seem to have lasted. A quarter of a century after the event, the pictures that have enjoyed an astonishing revival – being exhibited, published and screened under the title National Portraits both in the UK and in Europe – are the free portraits, the ones I took only to give away.

What, in 1973, I considered to be the bait on my photographic hook turned out to be the big fish itself.

Revival

IN THE AUTUMN of 1994, looking though the contact sheets in my archive, I came upon the bus portraits. They seemed fresh, even modern. I made some prints and left them lying around for the diversion of friends and visitors.

One such was Alan Dein, an oral historian then working for the National Sound Archive at the British Library. He had arrived to interview me for “Talking Photography” – a project directed by the critic, curator and writer Val Williams – after buying a dog-eared copy of Living Like This at a market stall in London’s Brick Lane.

Val Williams was already aware of the Free Photographic Omnibus – indeed I had carried an advertisement for her first gallery, Impressions in York, on the back of the bus for some months back in 1973 – but she didn’t know about the portraits. When she saw them she was so excited she was determined to mount a new exhibition.

She made an appointment for me at the National Portrait Gallery. It was not a fruitful meeting. The senior curator did not like the pictures. He operated a policy of only exhibiting photographs of “those who have achieved”, and because the people represented in my pictures were “unknown”, he refused to hang them. In the first flush of our enthusiasm we had forgotten that the National Portrait Gallery is the Hello! magazine of London’s galleries.

Frustrated that the only national portrait of ordinary English people ever attempted by a solo photographer should be dismissed so casually, Williams renamed the project National Portraits and together we approached Simon Grennan of the Viewpoint Gallery, Salford. Excited by the work’s appeal as a “flawed ethnography”, he agreed to collaborate in raising the funds to mount a touring exhibition. This was eventually achieved with help from the bus’s original sponsors, Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance, who contributed £6,000, and the Arts Council of England who awarded the project an £11,000 publication grant (in real terms £1,000 more than it awarded my 1970s journey) to produce a quality catalogue.

In February 1997, when the catalogue was published, the Guardian Weekend ran the bus portraits as its cover story along with an article by Val Williams. She wrote that my subjects

stood against concrete walls which dripped and stained as the Welfare State began to totter and Margaret Thatcher bided her time.

In these photographs, there is an aching melancholia; they could have been taken in another century, so little can we recognise of our contemporary world. They are like an anthropologist’s record of a forgotten tribe, and there is very little in them that we can place in ’nineties England – a brand name here and there perhaps, and the familiar confrontational stare of youth; but these are only traces. All the teenagers we see in the photographs will be grown up now and the flared trousers, the rayon slacks and the platform heels dumped in the rubbish bin of history.

Meadows often photographed people in pairs: adolescent girls marooned in temporary closeness, or boys full of nervous bravado as they cruised the town-centre of a Saturday afternoon, just waiting for something to happen. In the photos, their shyness is apparent, hands gripped, awkward in the soon worn-out fashions of the mid-seventies. No one performed for the camera in the way they might now, but it was theatre nonetheless, on both sides of the lens …

Meadows’ criteria for photographing people was their ordinariness. When Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin climbed on the bus, Meadows took up his invitation for tea and a hot bath, but refused to photograph him because he wasn’t “ordinary” enough. And his decision was probably the right one, for these photographs are a cross-section of a collective memory in which individuals become symbolic. If we dare to look closely enough, we can find ourselves in them – the fat solitary boy in the stripy jumper; the schoolgirls bound by a friendship which should have lasted forever; the adolescent girls, energetic and distressed; the likely lads in the protective carapace of the teenage gang. Maybe we even remember the aloneness of being a baby in a grown-up world, having to stand still for the photographer.

After it was launched in April 1997 at the Viewpoint Gallery, the National Portraits exhibition toured the UK, eventually showing at the National Museum of Photography Film & Television in August 1997. It reached London in the spring of 1998 for the Shoreditch Biennale, the East London photography festival organised by Val Williams and Anna Fox and attended by enthusiasts, writers, curators and photographers from all over the UK as well as from the continent and North America.

When the portraits entered the public arena I began to worry and wonder about the people depicted in them. How would they feel about being “rediscovered”? What had happened in their lives? But how could I find them given that, for the most part, I had no addresses?

I decided to solicit the help of local newspapers in towns where I thought enough of a community might have survived for the pictures to jog a memory or two. I chose Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria; Hartlepool in County Durham; and Southampton. The response was good and, in 1996, together with Alan Dein and the Radio 4 producer Mark Burman, I made a BBC documentary, Living Like This, in which we interviewed some of those who featured in the bus portraits. In due course – and inevitably I suppose – I began to re-photograph the people I found.

In the articles I had asked readers to telephone in if they recognised themselves, or anyone, in the pictures. It was hardly an exact science and it was painstaking work. It is one thing to identify people, but something else altogether to find them again or to persuade them to turn up at the same time on the same day and be re-photographed.

But I was fired by my curiosity and spurred on by something Williams had written in her essay for the National Portraits catalogue. “Daniel Meadows has traced many of the people he photographed then,” she wrote, “but this is of little interest to us. It wouldn’t even help to know their names.”

I couldn’t agree with that.

To me these people were only too real.

Interest in National Portraits continued to grow. In 1997 the German satellite TV station Sat-3 made a short film about the project and, in 1998, at the invitation of curator Gabriel Bauret, the pictures were featured at the Rencontres D’Arles international festival of photography in France.⁶

It took 25 years, but suddenly everyone was interested in the Free Photographic Omnibus portraits. In May 1998 they were included in the British Council exhibition Look At Me – Fashion and Photography in Britain 1960 to the Present, then embarking on its world tour at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam.

In September it seems the Free Photographic Omnibus had acquired “cult status” as one of the top ten eccentric photographic projects of all time.⁷

In December a set of National Portraits was published in New York in the $80 Joe’s Magazine where they appeared between the same covers as a naked Kate Moss, photographed by Bruce Weber.

In due course, word spread that I had begun to do reshoots and, in October 1999. Dazed & Confused magazine published four pairs of what I had started to call my Now & Then pictures. “It might be more accurate to call them ‘Then and Then’ portraits, for photographs are always of the past,” wrote David Brittain, editor of Creative Camera, in Dazed & Confused. He continued:

[Meadows] has created short “photo romans” (literally photo novels). Each “novel” comprises two photographic portraits, each representing two distinct moments in time. In contrast to the newspaper picture essay, for example, whose meaning is determined by text or captions, the photo roman is purely visual and therefore open-ended, offering the possibility of multiple meanings. We are compelled to compare two fictions to produce a third … Daniel Meadows began this project with wildly ambitious expectations that were never fully realised … Interestingly, as it continues to evolve, the work pushes the boundaries of what is understood as “documentary photography”.

Later that month I went to Finland and exhibited these paired pictures for the first time. The occasion was Backlight, Tampere’s fifth international photography triennial. Its theme: “Documents and Identities”.

Eventually it was time to put words to the pictures and, at the end of 1999, the literary magazine Granta published a larger selection of the Now & Then pictures than had previously appeared, along with some of the writing I had done about the lives of the people photographed.

Since then I have built a website for the work (www.photobus.co.uk) and travelled with it on lecture tours to Finland, France, Italy and Ireland. In August 2000 I took it to Moscow as a guest of InterFoto 2000.

The bus itself is now a museum piece – but as an idea with a life of its own the Free Photographic Omnibus travels on.

In the 1970s my journey coincided with television actor Tom Baker’s incarnation as Doctor Who. Because I had a knitted scarf and wore my curly hair long, people – especially children – often mistook me for him. A quarter of a century on, it now seems that the bus was a kind of time machine. I had thought I was at the wheel, but now I realise I was just another passenger.

Documentary: A Brief Lecture

THE PICTURES FROM the Free Photographic Omnibus are works of “social documentary photography”, a definition I first came to understand courtesy of William Stott.

In 1973, remarkably, no one had ever written a book that examined across its full range the philosophy behind the documentary approach – what Stott calls the “genre of actuality … the communication, not of imagined things, but of real things only”.⁸ Plenty of people had studied documentary film or documentary literature, but no one had examined simultaneously the many layers of documentary including photography, broadcasting and art.

Stott was then a graduate student in American Studies at Yale and his dissertation Documentary Expression and Thirties America was published that year, which was fortunate for those of us who were just then setting out on our careers as documentarists.

Stott’s book has yet to be bettered. It was revised in 1986 and is still in print. Its author went on to be a professor of American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin.

For Stott, social documentary is “a radically democratic genre”.

It dignifies the usual and levels the extraordinary. Most often its subject is the common man, and when it is not, the subject, however exalted he be, is looked at from the common man’s point of view.⁹

I like that.

What is really glorious about Stott is that, unlike so many latter-day theorists who would have us read photographs solely as texts, he celebrates beauty and even stresses the importance of photographic feeling.

Many documents are rhetorically dull and /or philosophically puerile. Social documents, however, increase our knowledge of public facts, but sharpen it with feeling … put us in touch with the perennial human spirit, but show it struggling in a particular social context at specific historical moments. They sensitise our intellect about actual life.¹⁰

Chapters such as “The Primacy of Feeling” and “A Documentary Imagination” indicate all by themselves the nourishing richness Stott found in documentary. He argues that at its very best social documentary is “capable of permanent revelations of the spirit”. As in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, a study of three sharecropper families in dustbowl Alabama that remains one of my favourite books.¹¹

According to Stott, social documentary

shows man at grips with conditions neither permanent nor necessary, conditions of a certain time and place: racial discrimination, police brutality, unemployment, the Depression … pollution, terrorism … man-made phenomena.

Today we might add to that list “star-fucking”: the dominant and thriving two-and-a-half-million-readers-a-week-fawning-Hello!-magazine-culture that is arguably the man-made phenomenon of our time.

The Free Photographic Omnibus was the Great Ordinary Show: its passengers boarded for free and instead of a ticket they received a photograph. They were individuals, not types. Special.

James Agee also knew that individuals were special. Sent in 1936 by Fortune magazine to write about cotton tenancy for the documentary slot “Life and Circumstances” (an assignment that he turned into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), he rejected the notion that people can be studied as “average” or “representative types”. Each of us, Agee insisted, is unique, “a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again”.

Bad Habits

THE PHOTOGRAPHY WRITER A. D. Coleman wrote that the function of documentary and photojournalism was originally

informational and/or representational. It was the general purpose of those involved to inform – literally, give form to – what would otherwise be a welter of dissociated data; their intent was “to bring clearly before the mind” the events of their time – that being the primary definition of representation …

Furthermore:

… producers and consumers alike appear to operate on the assumption that such imagery is not primarily concerned with the private life or inner landscape of the photographer. Instead, it is taken for granted that such work addresses events external to the photographer, occurrences in what we refer to as the “real world”.¹²

Coleman wrote this as a prelude to examining the consequences of the demise of photojournalism’s traditional market (weekly picture magazines) and the considerable changes to the documentary form – structural, conceptual, performative – that have taken place over the last 30 years.

Indeed the many different ways in which we “read” photographic images, both still and moving, is a defining characteristic of our age; a testament to the influence of twentieth-century thought: the ideas of Sigmund Freud (“the unconscious functions by signs, metaphors, symbols, and in this sense it is like a language”); Walter Benjamin (“must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures?”); Roland Barthes (“readers create their own meanings”); and Umberto Eco (“there is no language of photography”).

In 1973, when I set off on my bus, we all knew what documentary was. Today we’re not so sure. We’ve been hoodwinked by photographs so often that we no longer trust what they appear to show. Don’t worry, we say, it probably never happened. Not like that anyway.

With its mission to emancipate the ordinary, documentary photography has gradually unwrapped itself as a subtle, subjective and complex medium, as easily capable of distortion and fiction as anything found in literature, but nevertheless a high octane and indispensable injection for the imagination and a fixer of the Zeitgeist.

Documentary tends to be done for reasons that are personal to the documentarist – the author of the idea as well as of the pictures. Documentary is not primarily driven by commerce, although there is frequently a political as well as an aesthetic motive. Motivated by curiosity first and foremost, the documentary photographer takes his time over what he does, trying all the while to impose order on the chaos in front of the lens. Documentary photographs are not always surprising, or at least not in the first instance. They require contemplation.

“While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph,” said Lewis Hine, the photographer who did so much to expose the iniquities of child labour in the early twentieth century. “It becomes necessary,” he said in a voice that echoes in the very soul of photography, “to see to it that the camera we depend on contracts no bad habits.”

It didn’t take long for documentary to contract bad habits. In 1936, when Walker Evans learned that the photographer Arthur Rothstein – his colleague in the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (in effect a propaganda arm of Roosevelt’s New Deal, set up to provide employment for out-of-work photographers) – had carried around in the boot of his car the steer’s skull that featured in his famous symbolic photograph of the poverty of dustbowl agronomy, he, along with members of Congress, felt betrayed.¹³

“I never touch a thing!” protested Evans.¹⁴

In that same year, Bill Brandt published his photographic study of the English, The English At Home, which was less a celebration of the English character – as at first sight it seemed – than an acid critique of the huge privilege gap that existed in England at the time. That documentary photography could be at one and the same time sympathetic and subversive was a revelation. What Brandt concealed, however, was the extent to which the pages of his book were peopled by members of his own family posing, often entirely out-of-character, as lovers, bathing belles, drunks and theatre-goers.

As one by one these documentary fictions were exposed, advocates of the naturally observed – who had always assumed that the valued bond of trust between a photographer and his subject was something that also extended to the reader – turned in the shallow graves of their credulity and wondered.

Today bad habits are the norm – only now we call it “attitude”. Contemporary documentary concerns itself less with the “truth” of what has been witnessed than with the meaning imposed by the way the photographer has seen. What today we celebrate first about documentary is the instant connection it makes with our imagination. That something “happened” or didn’t “happen” in the precise way that it has been seen by the camera is less important. Nevertheless the archive of the collective unconscious is filled with flat 8 x 10s. As Walter McQuade wrote about the pictures of Walker Evans, “they have become a part of our past, whether or not we were ever there.”¹⁵

Modern documentary pictures are presented and re-presented in a myriad of contexts, each time gathering up new meanings.

Take Martin Parr’s oh-so-tender picture of that elderly couple waiting to be served in a seaside café, first published in his 1986 book The Last Resort. It shows a man in left profile, his cigarette hanging Andy Capp-style from his bottom lip, his collar and his tie, his balding short back and sides. Opposite him, across a table laid for tea with knives and forks and a plate of sliced bread and butter, sits the wife, toying with her wedding ring. Parr has re-presented this picture frequently, each time allowing (willing?) its meaning to shift. When he included it in his Bored Couples exhibition he made an assumption; when he sold it for a Fiat finance newspaper advertisement with the caption “No Interest for Two Years” he allowed in a judgement; more recently it has been the cover illustration for a book by Simon Armitage and once again its tender origins have been restored.¹⁶ By rolling it around in the market place Parr has kept the picture flickering in our minds. It’s not just “out there”, it’s “in here” too.

When Barthes said that “readers create their own meanings” documentarists worried themselves crazy. Today, though, this is the idea that excites. Like religion, documentary depends upon the faith of individuals for its interpretation. As often sneering, bossy, outrageous or misanthropic as it is “concerned”, documentary is alive and cannot be pinned down. Of Walker Evans it was said that he had created “a new set of clues and symbols, bearing on the question of who we are”.¹⁷ The same is true of Martin Parr.

Today’s documentarists, trusting only their own experience and having little faith in the quaint photo-documentary ambitions of an older generation, turn their lenses on themselves.

Somewhere in the democratic forest ¹⁸ of the documentary imagination, Nan Goldin, whose Ballad of Sexual Dependency¹⁹ chronicled her own tempestuous love life – including masturbating boys, incidents of violence and men in slips copulating – meets William Eggleston, the enigmatic confederate colonel of new colour, and it is enough that the pictures that emerge are beautiful and colourful … and full of whatever you want them to mean.

Today’s documentarists value the “navigation of the real” only in so far as it gives us a vehicle for our dreams and a connection with our individual experience. What we trust is what goes on between our ears. If it’s true in our heads then it happened sure enough. Whereas once the best documentary photographers – Joseph Koudelka with his epic story of gypsies (posing for family portraits, shaving, sleeping, feeding their babies, making music, drunk, awaiting execution, burying their dead) – always left space for the imagination, now the imagination appropriates the plain fact of what is witnessed by the camera. Thus today’s documentarists can barely be distinguished from artists.

In 1998, gallery-goers repeatedly referred to my National Portraits exhibition for the Shoreditch Biennale as an “installation”, and to me, the photographer, as an “artist”. Not that I mind – I’ve had a lot of labels. It’s just that when I shot these pictures I had no idea what a reservoir they would provide for internal projection.

It is but a short step from dreams to digital reality. To be surprised by the real has been documentary’s joy. But now that “the real” is between our ears it doesn’t even matter that what looks real has, in fact, been invented and brought before us courtesy of a computer.

In the spring of 1999 I went to see the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. Gursky’s wall-sized colour prints of Times Square, a May Day rave, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, apartments in Atlanta, tower blocks in Hong Kong Island and so on have been “enhanced”. They are a montage of images mixed inside a computer, but because this process is so seamless, it is impossible for the spectator to see the joins. You cannot be sure what you are looking at. Did this image ever exist in reality? Or is it merely a product of the photographer’s imagination? Outside the banner read ANDREAS GURSKY: PHOTOGRAPHS 1994–99.

I looked at these pictures very closely, so closely in fact that I drew the attention of an attendant. Young and flushed, she came running over.

“Please don’t touch the photographs!” she snapped.

“But they aren’t photographs,” I replied. “They’re pixelgraphs.”

She gave me the stare. (Got a right one here – I could see it on her face.) “Just don’t touch them, okay?”

“Touch what? There are no photographs here.”

A small crowd had gathered. A Saturday morning crowd of gallery-goers: chic young wives with toddlers in pushchairs; elegant ladies; a young man in a blazer with his greybeard father; and an intellectual in a tweed jacket.

“Don’t you know anything?” he demanded without waiting for an answer and longing to dazzle us. “All