John Myers: Middle England
Ikon Gallery is currently hosting the first major exhibition by photographer John Myers. Highly recommended to fans of George Shaw, the exhibition includes portraits of Midlanders taken between 1972-1979, revealing the very people missing from George’s landscapes.
Myers was the senior lecturer in Fine Art at Stourbridge College, and his photography was a reaction to the explosion of interest in the medium during the 1970′s. This was the decade when Robert Frank’s The Americans really made it’s impact, along with the work of Diane Arbus and others. It was also the time when Ansel Adams and his ilk were revered, but Myers noted that for lack of a dramatic backdrop like Yosemite he was going to have to work with what he had.
“You’ve got to come to terms with the place that you live in,” he says, and that meant engaging with the kind of landscape that most of us recognise. A landscape of car parks, building sites, shop windows and substations. A place that, as George Shaw observes, is “a little bit crap” but it’s really all we’ve got, and through the eye of someone like him or John Myers we see its potential renewed.
His series of substation photographs for example – they’re like tourist photographs of Mayan ruins, albeit tourists from the far future, who would look upon the remains of these buildings and wonder just what they were used for.
The collection shows us a world that is almost gone. Clothes and interior decorations alter with the fashions, but what’s also changed is the sense of space, a scape in which things might happen. I could be romanticising the past here – which would be nothing new – but in the era documented by Meyers’ photographs there was still some sense of a future. Now it seems like there’s no future, just an endlessly-sustained present in which we use phbotographs like these to remind us of that indefinable something that has been lost forever.
Middle England is on until the 5th February.
