33 portraits, 14 boring photographs, 10 televisions, 8 sub stations, 6 houses, 3 furniture stores & one giraffe

John Myers

Girl in Hood, 1973

Young boy with ball, 1974

Peter Olley, Jessie & Eve, 1973

Santa Claus at Tesco’s, 1972

Mr and Mrs Seabourne, 1973

The Bed, 1976

Television No. 10, 1973

The seventies – in glorious black and white. John Myers’ delightful exhibition captures with disarming tenderness the texture of ordinary life in the seventies – ‘the decade that style forgot’. Candlewick bedspreads; mantelpiece arrangements; leggy house-plants on TV cabinets; bedrooms adorned with Donny Osmond posters... through Myers’ lens, the ordinary and the everyday are given stature. And paradoxically they become very special indeed.

Photographer John Myers at the exhibition in the Gallery of Photography

This comprehensively-titled exhibition delivers a blast of nostalgia for the over-forties, and a shot of cool irony for younger stylistas. Above all, it invites viewers to look again at the overlooked and to celebrate photography’s ability to democratically record the world around us.

Photographer John Myers signing a copy of his book

Photographer John Myers with Curators Tanya Kiang & Trish Lambe

Photographer John Myers

Recalling the work of the American movement known as the New Topographics as well as that of masters such as August Sander, the Bechers and Diane Arbus, Myers deadpan documentary approach is also an eloquent rebuttal to the orthodoxies of photography – to the prescription that skies must be ‘interesting’, or moments ‘decisive’. Myers’ formally-considered, exquisitely-composed images were all made between 1972 and 1979, within walking distance of his home in Stourbridge, near Birmingham. At first known only to the cognoscenti, Myers’ work has received critical recognition and public acclaim following its first major exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in 2012. Since then, its place in photo history has been safeguarded with the creation of the John Myers Archive by the Library of Birmingham, and its inclusion in the new edition of The Photo Book (Phaidon).

John Myers (b. 1944, Bradford UK) studied fine art at Durham University, King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne under Richard Hamilton. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Stourbridge College in 1969 and began taking photographs in 1972. Almost all of his work was taken using a 4 x 5 inch Gandolfi plate camera. In 1973, twelve of his portraits were shown in the Arts Council’s Serpentine Photography 73, at the Serpentine Gallery, London. In the following year, his book Middle England was among the first photographic publications to receive Arts Council funding. His work was showcased in British Image 1, 1975. A review of his portraits and ‘Landscapes without interest’ (Boring photographs) was published in the first edition of Ten8 in 1979. Myers eclectic interests are demonstrated by his initiation and organisation (with colleague Geoff Holt) of Seeing the Unseen: The High Speed Photography of Dr Harold Edgerton. This was the first UK exhibition of the work of Dr. Edgerton and was shown at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1976 and five other centres. John Myers lives in Stourbridge, near Birmingham, and paints.