The archive

What do you consider to be your archive?

Meadows' archive comprises material assembled over four decades - many thousands of photographs, rolls of film and contact sheets, posters, magazines, books, receipts, newsletters, correspondence, notebooks, audio tapes, digital stories and other contextualising documents.

"I was a devil for just writing snatches of conversations...this is me having a conversation with some cyclists written on a napkin. So there are bits like that, scraps of documents, posters, published work, books, magazines, newspaper articles and audio-tapes. and then there's my PhD, which is actually 18 boxes; it was a PhD by publication and it tells the whole story of digital storytelling."

He also has "a lifetime of teaching materials" and a collection of books. “It’s not particularly special, most photographers have a got a collection; it also reflects the journey of one’s life," says Meadows. It includes, for example, a series of books published annually by Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish national newspaper, which brought together images by photographers living in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, who took part in workshops run by Meadows and Colin Jacobson in the 1990s.