I'm Daniel Meadows and some people would call me a photographer, but I like to think of myself
more as a documentarist, somebody who documents the world about him using lots of different
tools, not just photography. When I started out, I was a person who was incredibly curious
about the world. So in 1970 when I went to art school in Manchester, I'd had a childhood
living in boarding schools and I knew same-sex boarding schools, I knew boys and I knew boys
from one class and I knew men from one class of society. So there I was 18 and I didn't
know anybody, I didn't know any people of colour, I didn't know any women. I was immensely
curious about the world, it was 1970, the Vietnam War was on, we had the student riots
in Paris and I just wanted to embrace the world. And so when I first started running
free studios, the reason I ran them was because I wanted to meet people, I wanted to hear
their stories and very quickly I realised that I wasn't a photographer in the conventional
sense, I wasn't about trying to flatter people by making nice portraits of them, I wasn't
interested in advertising and fashion and those things, I was just interested in people
and I was interested in the tales they told us as much as the pictures that I was making
of them. And I learned very rapidly that what my work was about was about engaging, about
engagement, I became a kind of mediator for other people's stories. So when I lived in
my bus, I was young and new and I had a few skills I'd learned at college and I was trying
to do this democratic way of working and by giving people pictures away and by sitting
and listening to people's stories. But as I got more skillful and picked up various professional
ways of working, I learned skills which I could then use and were sitting there as it
was waiting for the digital age and when the digital age came by running workshops where
you could teach people how to make their own TV, we make the connection between the pictures
on the wall in the exhibition which are portraits from the 1970s done randomly on the street
with anybody who was willing to pose for my camera through to stories, two minute stories
made for television by people who were now empowered with new tools by attending one
of the digital storytelling workshops.
My name's Stanley Graham and I'm making this small film for my friend Daniel Medders on
the kitchen table at home. The idea is to prove hopefully that even a crumbly can get
over this technology without any training and turn something out that's worth looking
at.
Digital stories are a kind of access level but nevertheless elegant multimedia form
that people can learn quite quickly. They are written in the first person, I, me, mine
and they're scripted so people write a two minute script usually about 250 words and
they tend to use pictures rather than videos, still pictures, photographs and so you had
this fantastic sort of lovely gaggle of invisible histories that started to emerge, people telling
their own stories. Why do I think this is so important that we do these things? I think
it's important because it's about power ultimately that we live in awe of people who live on
the television screen. Meanwhile those of us who are living our lives daily on this
planet, time slipping by without the things that concern us being the issues that we're
talking about. So if you can make your own stuff, make your own media then the power has
shifted and you know I look forward to a time where everybody can be on the stage sometimes.
