Many photographers are fascinated with finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, but not John Myers: "I never deliberately photographed the 'overlooked' or the mundane. This is the world I live in, and that was why I photographed it - because there was nothing else."
What's more, he insists he's never received any funded commissions or taken pictures with any project or plan in mind - especially the sort of intent that recently saw Craig Easton named Photographer of the Year.
"Documentary photographer" is most definitely not how Myers would like to find himself described: "I have never regarded the photographs as 'documents' of what Stourbridge looked like in the 1970s. I am not interested in any historic dimension others seek to impose on the work ... [and] I didn't take the photographs of shops so that they would be remembered - I took them because I went into the shops to browse and buy. They were - and still are - a part of where I live."
All of which may very well be true - but, as this gallery of his images taken in the 1970s and 1980s illustrates, that "historic dimension" is not something that he (or any other photographer, for that matter) can truly escape, whatever their initial intentions. And neither is such a dimension something that viewers artificially "impose" - it's the simple passage of time that, whether Myers likes it or not, has made his pictures increasingly interesting, and will only continue to do so into the future.
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