36 pages
printed and manufactured in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm

Also available as part of a bundle, at a discounted rate.

In 1972 I was twenty years old and in my second year studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic. When the summer term ended, together with my friend and fellow student Martin Parr, I joined Butlin's Photographic Services as an official 'walkie' photographer. We needed paid employment, money to see us through the summer, but we also wanted to make a collaborative work of social documentation. We used two different cameras: theirs for the paid job, ours for the documentary. Theirs was a Leica M1, mine a Pentax Spotmatic.

Curated by Andy Sproxton (1949-1977) and Val Williams, the work was exhibited as Butlin's by the Sea at Impressions Gallery in York that November, along with a collection by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the Victorian photographer of Whitby. It was their inaugural show and a significant one, for Impressions was the first gallery of photography to open outside of London.

In the years that followed, whenever Parr, Williams and I discussed the show, we always remembered it as being in black & white for, back then, black & white was the colour of photography. (Parr wouldn't launch his groundbreaking colour work The Last Resort for another fourteen years.) However, when researching my archive in 2011, Williams turned up these colour pictures of mine — badly scratched and damaged by fungus — in the bottom of a cardboard box, along with an installation picture showing some of them printed very small and mounted in blocks of four, hanging in the exhibition. Butlin's by the Sea, it seemed, hadn't after all been only in monochrome.

Those experiments with colour transparency, now digitally repaired and restored, are the series from which the colour images here have been chosen.

Daniel Meadows

The Daniel Meadows Archive is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Ref. Bodleian Libraries | Archive of Daniel Meadows, photographer and social documentarist | Early material, 1970-3 | Butlin's by the Sea, 1972 | MSS. Meadows 47-48