http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/   Ikon gallery,  Birmingham. 

Visited the Ikon today.

 A series of   images spanning between 1972-79 all taken in the Midlands,  interestingly Myers 
 was not a photographer when he started his project.  I found the exhibition  evocative, I grew up in the Midlands, these    images brought back so many memories  of friends , family , and places, now long gone. For this reason I  found 
viewing them bittersweet. His portraits of local people, of whom the  majority  lived within walking distance of his home, are not casual snapshots:he used a  large format Gandolfi camera.  The subjects themselves are not glamorous " 
Myers  had identified a major part of the   population that went about its  business camouflaged in ordinariness and not in  the least picturesque" * .  Its this "ordinariness" * that make them all the more  poignant, they record a social era that is unrecognisable now.


 *( pg 9 Paperback, black and white  illustrations, 128 pages, W200mm x H245mm. An illustrated catalogue to accompany  John Myers exhibition at Ikon. Essays  by Paul Lewis, writer and photography  specialist and Eugenie Shinkle,  photographer writer and senior lecturer in  Photographic Theory at the  University of Westminster.)




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