John Myers ...

John Meyers Compromises black and white photographs made in the 1970s, Ikon’s selection includes Middle England (1970–1974), a number of portraits of individuals and families living in and around Stourbridge and the Black Country.

Myers’ approach is documentary in style, reflecting the taste, self-perceptions and aspirations of the people he photographed. Thus we observe them in their sitting rooms and bedrooms, or in their leisure or work spaces, surrounded by the telling paraphernalia of their daily lives. They pose with deliberate stances and gestures, responding to the sense of occasion engendered by Myers’ use of a Gandolfi plate camera set on a tripod with a dark viewing cloth. As well as domestic interiors, occupied particularly by couples and women, we see the studio where a young girl attends ballet classes, the back yard where a boy plays football and a club where two men play snooker.

Myers chose to photograph people who lived within walking distance of his own home, and so he recorded the world as he knew it. A kind of natural history unfolds through Middle England, with its depictions of human life and habitats, significantly as the portraits are shown alongside an exceptional image of a giraffe in a zoo enclosure. This juxtaposition reminds us of the fact that we are shaped by our built environments, as much as we shape them.


what i love about his photographs is that they simply catch your eye straight away and they are also very simply to look at so when your viewer looks at the photographs they can tell what they are about straight away instead of the viewer being mindless about the photographs.


 August Sander, Diane Arbus and Lewis Hine are 3 photographers that influenced him for some of his images. He was explaing how he took hundreds of photos before he was happy with any of them! All of his work is highly influenced by other photographers, he likes to create work of the similar style but not the same. He also said that he never uses flash when he takes images, he likes natural light or the simple lights around the subjects.

August Sander 

John is interested in how much space there is in each of his photographs and how much space is used in the images.He is also interested in where things and subjects are positioned in each of his photographs. 

Arbus

John was looking at how the people in her photographs are formed centrally within her images. He's interested in how all the figures are contained within the photographs, we see the whole of the person or figure and not just a fraction.

Lewis Hine

John is interested in all of Lewis' portraits. He likes the fact that the figures are trapped within the space by the surrounding architecture and objects in one of Lewis' photographers.