Whether shooting civil rights marches or Studio 54 style icons, the politically conscious photographer – who died last month – cast a critical eye on the American class system

Continue reading...

H​alf a century ago, the British portrait photographer captured ​some of the regulars at a game in Northumberland as part of his celebrated 14-month tour of England

In 1973, aged 21, Daniel Meadows refitted a 1948 doubledecker as the “Free Photographic Omnibus” and set out on a 14-month journey around England offering portraits, gratis, to all-comers. In the back window of the bus was a Letraset sign to give punters an idea of the project: Meadows was in the business, it proclaimed, of capturing “how things are and how they are changing”. With this in mind, he covered 10,000 miles and made audio recordings along with his pictures, selling the idea to his subjects that their images and thoughts would be preserved for history. That hopeful pitch came true. The archive of Meadows’s journey was bought by the Bodleian Libraries in 2018. A selection of the pictures and fragments of reporting from his journals and recordings are now collected in a new Book of the Road .

This image was taken during a couple of days in the Northumberland town of Haltwhistle that began at the Railway Inn, where Meadows, his diary records, played darts and sank several pints with some friendly ex-miners. Subsequently, he pitched up at the local bingo hall and, in breaks from “eyes down” games, talked to some of the regulars there. One, Moira Little, gave him a potted history of the place, which had been a music hall for the troops stationed nearby before they left for France in 1914, the stage featuring “stars like George Formby, Gracie Fields”. “After that,” Little said, “we had the silent films with a man playing the piano in the corner here” and then there were talkies. The bingo had taken over in the late 60s. “After the bingo was over,” Meadows reports, for posterity, “I went through to the Railway Inn again and did some pictures in the folk club… Retired to bed, pissed, about midnight.”

Book of the Road is published by Bluecoat Press . An exhibition, Free Photographic Omnibus, 50th anniversary , is at the Centre for British Photography, London SW1 until 17 December

Continue reading...

In 2011, the French-Senegalese photographer Delphine Diallo got a call from Joanne Petit-Frère , an artist who weaves majestic headdresses out of synthetic hair, asking to collaborate. She organised a photoshoot for the following morning with an all-Black, all-female creative crew. The resulting series, Highness , features a model wearing masks and headdresses that evoke African royalty as far back as the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. “I was born into a world where the image of Black women was objectified,” says Diallo. With this work, celebrating what Diallo calls the divine female body, she says: “I was like, enough! It really informed my understanding of the female gaze.”

• Delphine Diallo’s photobook Divine , published by Hat & Beard Press, is out now

Continue reading...

Chloe Sherman’s new book captures the rebellious nature of the lesbian scene in a city famed for its vibrancy and acceptance of queer culture. Renegades, San Francisco: The 1990s is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag

• ‘Sexual experimentation was central to our lives’: Chloe Sherman’s best photograph

Continue reading...

This fabulously detailed account of the great collector’s treasures, artist friends and the Cambridge art gallery home he built with his wife, Helen, is a fitting testament to his cunning, determination and impeccable taste

On New Year’s Day 1956, Jim Ede , then 60, wrote to his friend, the painter and poet David Jones , of a “quixotic scheme” he had for the remaining years of his life. Ede, who had been a curator at the Tate Gallery before the second world war, and a pioneering collector of the art of his friends and heroes – Jones, and the St Ives group of painters , and Miró and Brancusi – outlined in that letter an impulse to create a modest and lasting monument to what he had learned about art and about life.

Ede had in mind, he wrote, “a place of beauty in a town”, a home that would be open to students and to the public and allow him to share “all that I have in pictures and lovely objects”. It took him the best part of that year to find and buy four semi-derelict cottages just over Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge, once home to a playhouse owned by a Mr Joseph Kettle. Ede set to work making every corner of his Kettle’s Yard gallery a still life. For nearly 20 years he and his wife, Helen, welcomed the curious into their home. Ede, who died in 1990 aged 95, gave personal tours of the paintings and sculptures and the favourite found objects – pebbles and feathers and shells. He encouraged students to borrow original pieces to decorate undergraduate walls. Visitors were invited to sit down at the kitchen table with Jim and Helen for tea in china cups and hot buttered toast with marmalade cold from the fridge.

Continue reading...