[ad_1]
John Myers took these photographs in the Black Country of the West Midlands in the mid-1980s. They are included now in a book of his photographs called The End of Industry, but at the time Myers had no sense that the foundries and yards they depicted would shortly join many other iron and steel and metal-bashing companies in the region and be gone for good.
Myers, born in 1944, a student and then lecturer in fine art, had during the 70s been taking sly social realist photographs of his suburban neighbourhood in Stourbridge, and of more urban Dudley and beyond. “We spend a lot of our lives blocking out the world that we live in, just how awful it is, just how boring it is,” he says. His photography, inspired equally by the pioneering documentarist Eugène Atget and the urban American geometries of Ed Ruscha, was all about looking, about not blocking out. Some of the pictures that have become known as “the boring pictures” were careful series of dual carriageways, electricity substations and idle televisions in the corners of neat, pinched sitting rooms.
After the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, Myers started looking more closely at the environments of working lives near where he lived. He was involved in Labour politics, but the pictures were not intended to be polemical in any narrow sense, rather to show the industrial landscape as it was. The pace of factory closures that struck the Black Country was impossible to predict, even at the closest quarters. He had no sense that what he was photographing would look in retrospect like a final chapter. “Companies folded and factories were demolished at an unbelievably rapid rate in the couple of years after these pictures,” he says now, looking back. “People in that area had got used to that way of life since the Industrial Revolution – good employment, reasonable wages – and then that was all just clobbered overnight.”
Unlike the shipyards and docklands of the north-east or the mills and textile factories of Manchester, the relatively small-scale chain-making operations of Cradley Heath, the foundries of Brierley Hill and the brickworks of Kingswinford did not lend themselves to being recast as warehouse apartments. Many were simply flattened; others emptied out as goods yards and storage facilities.
“The big shock,” Myers says, “was the new landscape that emerged from that clearance, of warehousing and logistics and retail parks and enterprise zones and tarmac.” Local people, he suggests, are still living with the abrupt loss of human scale.
Myers made the portraits in this series, like all the work of that time, with a “cloth-over-the-head” Gandolfi camera. The long exposure perhaps added to the air of resignation in the foundry worker’s face, or in the shoulders of the woman beside her table piled with muck in the brick factory, or the concentration in the posture of the lathe operator.
Myers used natural light, which was frequently in short supply. He loved the depth of background detail that the format captured. The foundry worker in his beret is impossible to isolate from any of the objects that surround him; the looped chain, and the sluice and the metal pail and the corrugated doorway and the pile of steel moulds are as essential to the scene as he is. The effect Myers was hoping for was to render the people as simply another element in spaces that they had probably known all of their working lives, “as if it was their living room”.
Myers stopped taking photographs in 1990, and has devoted much of his subsequent creative life to painting, while continuing to work in higher education in Stourbridge. He had sent some of his photographs out to galleries in the 1980s but there was no interest. “At the time,” he says, “people looked at them but, as it were, didn’t see them.” Most of the photographs in the current book were not even printed up. His work – the “boring photographs” first – was rediscovered by the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and featured at Martin Parr’s national photography archive in Bristol. There was a significant exhibition of these industrial photographs in Bologna last year.
Myers is somewhat amused, but also gratified, by the sudden late exposure. “The fact was,” he says, “you didn’t get that many international art dealers hovering around in Stourbridge.” He does not think that the new interest has come entirely by chance, however. We are at a moment in British political life in which we are trying to understand how on earth we got here. The legacy of those brutally abrupt changes in the years of Myers’s photographs are still unravelling in the places they depict. “What was happening to Britain in 1985 perhaps explains a lot of what is happening in 2019,” he says.
The End of Industry by John Myers, published by RRB PhotoBooks, £75, is out now
[ad_2]
READ SOURCE
