LONDON.- The Guide combines some of the best-loved photographs from John Myers career with his unique and wry prose on the method and theory of his work. The photographs in the book are some of most familiar images from The Portraits, Looking at the Overlooked and The End of Industry alongside five previously unpublished works. The images are published alongside insights to the circumstances behind the pictures, influences and Myer’s working practice, drawing the reader into conversation.

A majority of the photographs in the book were taken within walking distance of Myers home in Stourbridge on his 5 x 4 Gandolfi plate camera between 1972 and 1988. He was driven by his admiration for the work of August Sander, Diane Arbus, Eugene Atget and Walker Evans and he only ever shot approximately 1800 negatives. The photographs are a study of the mundane and every day which is often seen, yet frequently dismissed.

‘I took my photographs in silence... I never worked with anyone else in the room - no distractions. The process wasn’t about talking - or putting the sitter at ease - and I began to realise that the fairly lengthy experience did certain things to people. They began to inhabit their own skin - the animation and gesture of the moment gave way to something that was inherently about themselves and their direct involvement in the process.'

'The wallpaper, clock, the Pyrex dishes in the recess of the glazed cabinet are signifiers but it is Mr Jackson’s hands and fingers that do the talking. Cupped and wrapped around the cigarette and the length of ash about to be lightly flicked onto the carpet reinforce the impression that the portrait hinges around the cigarette. I knew a man who claimed that cigarette ash was good for carpets, maybe he was right, and I can imagine Mr Jackson’ surreptitiously brushing the ash into the weave of the Wilton carpet with the sole of his slipper.'

'However much I may, at the time, have admired the skill of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston or the pastoral quality of Fay Godwin – they were photographing another world.

When I opened my front door I was confronted by Tarmac (asphalt), houses, a telegraph pole and a substation.'

'The Ten Televisions Camouflaged by house plants and nestling amongst the books, records and knick- knacks the televisions slip unannounced into these domestic interiors. The photographs often evokes responses ‘Oh I had an action man like that’; or a comment about a gas meter protruding from a wall. I sometimes sense that the TV screens themselves are invisible – a dead void at the very centre of the photograph.'

John Myers (1944) was born in Bradford. A selection of his photographs were first published in 1974 in the Arts Council funded book Middle England but it is only recently that his work has received renewed critical attention. Since exhibiting at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2012, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and books. His work is included in notable survey collections such as The Photography Book (Phaidon Press, 2014) and is held in the collections of the Library of Birmingham, the Arts Council Collection, and the James Hyman Collection amongst others. Although he is best known for his photography, he is also an accomplished painter and was senior lecturer in fine art at Stourbridge College of Art from 1969 to 1989 and senior lecturer in painting, and head of the MA in painting, at the University of Wolverhamptom from 1989 to 2001.