Ben Woolhead hears from two of the most celebrated visual documentarians of British life, photographers Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr, as an early-1970s university project of theirs – still fascinating after all this time – is exhibited in Rhondda’s Workers Gallery.
There can’t be too many final-year university assignments still being exhibited and spoken about more than 50 years after they were made. But Daniel Meadows and Martin Parr’s June Street, 1973 is no ordinary student project. And yet in one sense, it very much is – or was.
As they recently explained to a packed house at Paul Kirner’s Music Palace in Ynyshir – a magnificent venue a stone’s throw from the Workers Gallery, where the series is currently on display – the premise behind the project was simple. The two photography students, serendipitously brought together at Manchester Polytechnic after both flunking their A-levels, went in search of the real Coronation Street: two middle-class non-Northerners, curious to know what these tightly packed terraced houses were like inside.
June Street’s residents, won over by the promise of a free print, opened their doors and posed for family portraits in their front rooms. Meadows recalls pitching up with a Hasselblad camera borrowed from their department, an electricity-guzzling photoflood lightbulb and a pocket full of coins to feed the meters.
While the pictures weren’t staged, the duo did try to ensure that all of the inhabitants of each house were caught on camera, including pets. In one image, Meadows’ hand intrudes at the edge of the frame, trying desperately to attract the attention of a distracted dog. The pair of tights left dangling down from the mantlepiece to dry in front of the fire was, he revealed, a subsequent source of mild embarrassment for the family, but is one of the details that makes that particular photo really work.
For Meadows, “pictures have this fantastic trigger to memory” – and therein lies the secret of June Street’s enduring appeal. Public reactions to the images over the years have fascinated him, prompting lively conversations about everything from specific ornaments and the fashion for heavily patterned wallpaper to the best glue to use to repair the shell of a pet tortoise which has fallen out of a window. There is, he said, emotional power “that sits within a photograph”.
Parr, meanwhile, points out that the project’s appeal is not merely enduring but increasing. Society is changing so rapidly that what was once ordinary becomes extraordinary in the blink of an eye. As a result, he feels that it’s “a duty to be a documentary photographer,” rather than merely a vocation. The artform’s capacity to impose temporary stasis on perpetually shifting reality is arguably its greatest quality.
“There is,” Meadows says, “a lot of truth in those photographs” – and yet, in their depictions of contented, comfortable domesticity, they are also deceptive. Just two years after the pictures were taken, June Street was razed to the ground as part of the local urban regeneration programme – family homes reduced to nothing more than bricks and mortar. That threat was hanging over the heads of the residents at the time they were photographed, and the project effectively became an epitaph for a Salford that was swept away in the name of ‘progress’.
After graduation, emboldened by the June Street experience, Meadows embarked on the ambitious Free Photographic Omnibus project, travelling the length and breadth of the country in a double-decker bus converted into a mobile darkroom and gallery, and offering a portrait service. The 50th anniversary of that project has been marked by the publication of Book Of The Road through Bluecoat Press, which also plans to publish a similar volume commemorating the earlier collaborative venture between Meadows and Parr. Meadows revealed that irritation at the internet fad for colourising the original black-and-white pictures inspired the pair to propose interleaving the images with matching wallpaper samples, identified through painstaking research in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery archive.
What, then, were the take-home messages of the pair’s talk at the Music Palace? Print off your pictures, for starters; the potentially problematic ephemerality of digital was repeatedly emphasised. And, Parr insisted, take photographs of your living room and your kitchen, especially if they’re about to be redecorated or ripped out – such images may become valuable documentary evidence sooner than you think .
June Street, 1973 runs until Sat 16 Nov. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD
