John Myers is back with original book called Looking at the Overlooked - a good title for a photographer who specialises in images of the unremarkable,and who himself nearly fell from photographic history. Working in Britain's post-industrial Midlands from 1973-1981, Myers created an archive of the unspectacular that attracted attention at the time but then lay undisturbed for 30 years until a chance meeting with a curator. A solo present at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery followed in 2011, and kick-starting a comprehensive reappraisal at his work that's resulted in more solo shows and several publications.
Looking at the Overlooked is published by RBB Photobooks,which also published a collection of Myer's portraits earlier this year. But where The Portraits focused in on pictures of people, Looking at the Overlooked is a glorious compendium of "the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s". Focusing in on substations, and shops,houses, televisions, or so-called "landscapes without incident" - or as Myers puts it,"boring photographs" - the images are all recorded with a deadpan aesthetic that's won Myers comparisons to the celebrated original Topographics movement in the US.
Source: bjp-online.com