“The Photographer as Recorder”: Daniel Meadows, Records, Discourse and Tradition in 1970s England

Abstract

This paper examines a document, comprising text and photographs, produced in 1972 by an English photographer, Daniel Meadows, to publicise his plan to embark on a journey around England in a double-decker bus. The goal, he explained, was to complete a countrywide photographic survey of the “English people”, especially those whose quality of life he believed to be under threat. I argue that the document can be read in terms of advocacy and representation of a form of English photographic practice and its history; that its delineation of threatened English lives beset by social change can disclose relationships that prevailed between documentary practices, modernity and the idea of national identity; and that an understanding of the document's function and distribution as a material artefact can yield contextual conditions germane to its production. Referencing Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge these three lines of enquiry are followed under the headings of — respectively — Discursive Event, Archive and Surfaces of Emergence.