John Myers grew up in Bradford and studied fine art, print making and sculpture in Newcastle between 1963-67. He went on to teach at Stourbridge College of Art and later at the University of Wolverhampton.
Starting in 1973, partly as a way of getting to know Stourbridge, Myers took photographs of his new home town. These included portraits, either of people he knew or who lived close by. He also took a series of images of the streets, houses, shops and open spaces, within walking distance of home. These he called the “boring photographs”. He continued to take such photographs for a further eight years.
In an interview in 2015, Myers said about these images;
I spent a lot of time taking photographs when the light was flat, when there’s basically no shadow. Flat light. Dead. Boring. The angle of view was important, eye level, nothing fancy, deadpan. The absence of people was quite deliberate. But unlike a painting by Hopper with its sense of foreboding and events just beyond the frame – in these photographs there was no hidden story. I thought of them at the time as ‘landscapes without incident’.
Some forty years later, between late November 2011 and February 2012, many of these images along with others of electricity substations, furniture salerooms and TV sets, taken around the same time as the “boring photos”, were exhibited at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham as ‘Middle England’. This was effectively Myers’ first major exhibition and the start of his re-discovery as a photographer. A re-edit of these images was published in 2018 as Looking at the Overlooked by RRB Photobooks, Bristol.
Myers had become a photographer out of necessity in the sense that it was a form of image making that could be fitted around his work commitments.
This is not to say that he was an untutored or naïve photographer. He acknowledges the influence of August Sander and Diana Arbus in his portraits for example and, in the case of Arbus in particular, he also approves of her rejection of the kind of highly technical photography, which, in Myers’ words, amounts to “creation in the darkroom”. He also understood the place of his landscapes in the tradition of Eugene Atget and Walker Evans and he is sometimes regarded as an English example of William Jenkins’ later New Topographics; a loose grouping of photographers who also found beauty in the banality of a man- and machine-made landscape.
Myers’ specifically rejected not only the overwrought technical perfection of much contemporary photography (it seems he has a particular distaste for Edward Weston and Ansel Adams) but also its subject matter where such subject matter was the exceptional, the spectacular or the picturesque. This included the kind of ‘quaint Englishness’ of much British documentary photography of the period.
As he explains in a video made in association with his ‘Middle England’ Exhibition, Myers wanted to focus attention on the ordinary world and the ‘same place, different day experience’ through which most of us pass, most of the time. For Myers, “looking at the overlooked” is important in helping us “come to terms” with the world as it is when we don’t have Yosemite as our backyard and the ‘news’ is happening somewhere else.
The pace of Myers’ images is key to their effect as much as their subject. They are strikingly still images; images of nothing happening; images with no particularly obvious ‘subject’ even – although they are not without their irony and dark humour; the job centre’s doors are closed, the shops have nothing to sell and the tree of heaven, just isn’t. The stillness of the images is disturbing.
As Myers has noted;
I think one of kind of great problems (sic) in a lot of photography is that photographers think they’re creating a story … For me, too many photographs are full of chatter and noise and movement – newspapers are sold on the basis of noise, the more noise you can generate the better, and photographers go down that route. But what I enjoy is work that is silent.
The sense of the silent emptiness that is present in Myers’ images is reinforced by the absence of human subjects. It is not simply that there are no people in these images, there is a sense too that there never will be again; the sterile gardens, blank windows and empty streets seem more abandoned than just empty or unfinished.
It is this sense of abandonment, of a monochrome world where nothing happens to people who are invisible that connects and contrasts Myers’ work with his contemporaries such as Don Mcullin’s pictures of Bradford, Nick Hedges’ Birmingham or even Tish Murtha’s images of the North East.
But Myers’ approach is the more subtle. He captures not the legacy of the wrecking ball urban re-generation of the 1960s nor even the picturesque poor shot against a background of artfully framed economic decline and moral anxiety but the quiet, unremitting, casual brutality of the 1970s for those living ordinary lives or pretending to better ones.
Myers stopped taking photographs altogether in 1988 when the Stourbridge College of Art was threatened with closure before its merger with the University of Wolverhampton and Myers time was spent ‘trying to save my job’. In another age of willed political austerity, it is easy to understand Myers’ decision.
