John Myers has spent decades photographing what most people walk past: plain shopfronts, occupied streets, the faces of strangers, and the shells of a departing industrial world. The Guide collects that patient attention into a single volume, drawing on the three books RRB PhotoBooks has published of his work — The Portraits, Looking at the Overlooked and The End of Industry. The result is a retrospective of his own choosing, and an unusual one, because the commentary is his.

Myers is not a lecturer. His prose is wry and self-aware, closer to conversation than proclamation, and it explains how particular photographs came about, occasionally implicating the photographer himself. In doing so he answers, at book length, a question the critic Brad Feuerhelm once asked aloud: how does one come up with taking such images at all?

The book is designed to let its contents breathe. A large format gives the pictures the size and space they need; each story is set on its own page among companion images, so the text can be sampled at will while the eye moves through dense visual detail. Nothing forces a linear march through the sequence.

Five photographs appear here for the first time, among them two rare self-portraits made in the same period as the rest of the work. They add visual context to the writing and open a window onto the man himself, placing Myers — intermittently — in front of his own camera.

Published by RRB PhotoBooks in 2021 as a signed special edition in softcover, The Guide consolidates three strands of a career that would otherwise stay scattered. Its importance to a collection is documentary as much as visual: a considered single point of reference for how a photographer of quiet, sustained attention saw his subjects, and himself.