Boring pictures of Middle England
Marvellously mundane photos of a Black Country town.
John Myers photographed the things we pass every day but rarely notice. All within walking distance of his front door in the “quiet and unremarkable” Black Country1 town of Stourbridge in the 1970s and 80s.
Between 2018-19, RRB Photobooks published three wonderful books of his work. Books I return to time and again. There’s nothing contrived about these photos. The light is flat. The subject deadpan. They are photos of suburbs, substations, tarmac and bedspreads. Yet, the mundanity is what makes them so fascinating.
The Portraits
These were portraits of his neighbours, colleagues and friends taken in their homes, workplaces and backyards. They weren’t intended as an August Sander2 type sociological study, but they provide a subtle insight into the tastes, lives and pre-occupations of middle England in the 1970s.
The majority were taken with a cumbersome 4x5” Gandolfi plate camera which took time to position and forced both him and the subject to slow down and inhabit the space.
“The space around the subject was as important as the subject itself.”
Looking at the Overlooked
With titles like ‘Ring road gardens’, ‘Television no4’, ‘Dual Carriageway’, ‘Unidentified substation (no 3)’, ‘Bus Stop’ and ‘Lift doors at Waitrose’, these are photos of the overlooked subjects of every day life.
“There is no hidden story behind these photographs and no event is about to unfold beyond the frame. They are landscapes without incident.”
This is subtopia.3 Which isn’t a negative observation, it happens to be where he lived.
“We pass by these totems, each day, in our quest for the exciting and novel, and ignore the works that tell most unexpectedly of the conditions of modern life.”
The End of Industry
This series of photos were taken between 1981 and 1988. They showed the transformation of a Black Country town from manufacturing iron and bricks to a place of enterprise zones, retail parks and new housing estates.
I was growing up in an East Midland city when John Myers took these photos of a West Midland town. It feels familiar. Of non-descript days, spent in mundane places, where changes were imperceptibly happening.
We overlook them at the time. But when we look back, we notice how different it was then.
It reminds us to photograph the every day today. For today’s normal will look fascinating tomorrow.
The three books can be purchased individually. Or if you’d prefer to dip your toe into the water, there is a greatest hits published called ‘The Guide’.
The Black Country is an area west of Birmingham which was one of the birth places of the Industrial Revolution. It was given its name in the mid-nineteenth century. Either due to the soot and smoke spewing from the thousands of ironwork foundries and forges; or due to the thick coal seam which surfaced there.
August Sander’s ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ attempted to take a portrait of every ‘type’ of person in Weimar Germany.
Nice one Andrew, I particularly like the reflection of the photographer in the screen on Television number 4.
Brilliant share, resonant, thanks..!