Sixty years after the then editor complained about the poor quality of photographs submitted for publication, MARK LYONS spoke to Gerald Mead, who began photographing buses seventy years ago, about his approach to the subject, which he wrote about in the July 1965 issue. What has changed since then?
As befits a magazine that, until 1968, was entitled Buses Illustrated (BI), photographic content has always been important to Buses. Initially, everything was black and white but the first colour cover, of a Midland Red coach, was in September 1962. It was a publicity shot and used a colour block loaned by Midland Red, as colour printing then was highly expensive.
Although there was ad-hoc use of colour over the years, the first regular colour content (cover and a few inside pages, supported by colour advertising) was in January 1988 and the magazine became full colour in November 1999, with the 50th anniversary issue.
In the April 1964 issue, the editor, Alan Townsin, penned a leader entitled “Towards Better PSV Pictures”. He questioned why, unlike contemporary railway photographs which were often almost a form of art, the average bus photograph was rarely more than a pictorial record.
In addition to th…
