On 7 March, we were delighted to be joined by Daniel Meadows, photographer and documentarist, who came to the Studio to talk about a project he is currently developing, Talking Pictures, and his career-spanning efforts to create a democratic media.

At the beginning of the talk, Daniel spoke candidly about his early inspiration and his 14-month journey across the UK in a double decker bus (The Free Photographic Omnibus); a journey that saw him photograph the nation as he travelled.

In preparation for moving his archive of photographs, oral histories and documents to the Library of Birmingham, Daniel has been listening to the audio recordings that he made alongside his photography, which were initially intended to provide caption information. The more Daniel listened to the recordings, the more he became aware of the stories they revealed and he has begun to create short multimedia pieces that combine the audio and the photographs; these he calls Talking Pictures.

Daniel showed us a selection of the films, dating from his temporary studio in a disused barber’s shop in Manchester’s Moss Side, through his photobus days, to when he was exploring what was left of the cotton industry in Lancashire. All of the films gave us a glimpse of the rich, colourful characters of the people in Daniel’s photographs. They gave voice to the faces, and in response, we the audience were silently captivated.

Daniel then took his story from the 1970s to 2001, when he pitched an idea for a community digital storytelling project to BBC Wales, which, unexpectedly for him, was embraced. As a result, a van full of digital storytellers travelled across Wales running workshops to help people to tell their own stories, using digital tools to shape their narrative. The project ran for seven years, and the team worked with hundreds of people across the country. Daniel thinks of these pieces as 'multimedia sonnets from the people'. He showed us Samiya and Doris’s difital stories which were short, honest and moving.

Daniel's Talking Pictures and the BBC digital stories illustrated illustrated how media can be a tool in understanding each other; a notion supported by an Ivan Illich quote Daniel gave us:


‘Tools are intrinsic to social relationships ... convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich their environment with the fruits of his or her vision’

Daniel is interested in how photographs are absorbed and categorised by archiving systems. Often, photographs are archived using surface observations to create tags, like woman, young, child, mother, balloon, zoo. This doesn’t preserve the photographer’s intentions to capture something of the character of a human being, but typifies the subject of the photograph. This sort of categorisation in archiving is useful, but often allows the photograph to dull in a sea of tags; to be normalised and misunderstood.

In the digital age, pictures travel in new ways. Daniel is very interested in the traces left by photographs that gather momentum, and embark on surprising journeys, owing to accessibility of the internet. He showed us a wonderful short film he had made, relating the story of his photograph of Florence Alma Snoad; a portrait that had taken on a life of its own, years after it was taken.

The kind of digital storytelling that Daniel is engaged with is serving both the past and the present, by ensuring that peoples stories, told in a considered, honest, first person narrative remain accessible among a growing profusion of content in library archives and on the internet. Daniel hopes that those who see his Talking Pictures and the digital stories will be able to feel a sense of connectedness to a life lived by someone else, ‘for it is only by appreciating each other’s circumstances that we can hope to improve our world.’

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Please note: As they are new works, the Talking Pictures aren’t online, and so there are no links to them in this write up, but they will be online around the time that the Daniel Meadows: Early Photographic Works exhibition opens at the Library of Birmingham in May.

Daniel, Dr. Jenny Kidd from the University of Cardiff and Studio resident Victoria Forrest are currently working on a project called KeyColour. They are creating a cross-referenceable language for recording and categorising the more nuanced quality of audience/visitor engagement with subjective artworks, as opposed to the often objective descriptors. Keycolour will translate instinctive psychological reactions into a colourful, intriguing and enduring visualisation of affective emotional response.