Daniel Meadows: National Portraits: now & then

In 1973, with his mobile home, gallery and darkroom, "The Free Photographic Omnibus", Daniel Meadows travelled the length and breadth of the country documenting the life of ordinary people. The fresh young photography graduate visited provincial towns and cities where he offered a free photograph to people who posed for him. In retrospect this is a unique record of how we were then. Now he has returned to photograph the people again, twenty five years later, and in doing so he has unearthed the stories of their lives and reactions to the original photographs, bringing a new dimension to the earlier work. Looking at these pairs of images side by side, induces us to create our own romans about their lives, but also to consider the issues of the power of images and their meaning in the stories of our lives

Daniel Meadows has been working as a photographer since 1973 and as a photography teacher since 1981. He specialises in photo-reportage. Currently employed as the only photography specialist on the full-time staff in Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, he teaches photo-related subjects across all the courses of the school. He is employed on a research post and since 1998 has studied for a PhD. He has produced four books, the latest of which, National Portraits was published in 1997. He has exhibited widely with one man shows at London's ICA and Photographers' Gallery as well as the Royal Photographic Society, Bath and the National Museum of Photography Film and Television, Bradford. His work has also been exhibited on the continent of Europe. He has also written and presented documentaries for television and radio.