In 1973, Daniel Meadows bought an old Leyland Titan double-decker bus for £360.20. He spent the next 14 months driving around Britain, covering 10,000 miles and stopping in 22 places, where he gave passing locals a print of themselves in return for having their portrait taken. The Daily Mirror ran a feature on Meadows and his bus entitled “The Great Ordinary Show”. The bus, he later said, “was my home, my travelling darkroom, my gallery”.

Meadows, as this group shot shows, was a master of the great ordinary. His main subject, he said later, was “the British people... just ordinary folk”. The works that constitute his now classic documentary series The Bus are formal and monochrome, evincing the austere economic climate of early 1970s Britain, but also recalling a place where the idea of a working-class community still held sway.

Here, a row of local “boot boys” pose against a concrete wall in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, in their wide denims, “bum-freezer” jackets and “bovver boots” – one of the classic working-class uniforms from a time when street fashion was makeshift and not so in thrall to brands and labels. Meadows, a democratic photographer if ever there was one, names them all in his extended caption.

They are freeze-framed in a portrait that captures their carefreeness and obvious excitement at being photographed. For all that, it is a melancholy picture, made all the more so by the fact that Meadows photographed the same group decades later in the early 1990s, when age and conformity made them look ordinary but in an altogether less interesting way. Even in the hands of the most sympathetic photographer, the camera can be a cruel tool and photography a harsh medium. Best to remember them this way.

The work of Daniel Meadows features in Distinctly, a group exhibition of British photographers, part of Pingyao international photography festival 2018 in China, 19-25 September