John Myers’s The Portraits brings together his portrait photographs made across the West Midlands during the 1970s. Published by RRB PhotoBooks in 2018, the 176-page volume presents a body of work shaped by what Myers called “simple slow portraiture”: an unhurried form of attention directed toward people and places easily passed over by more conventional image-making.

The subjects are not reduced to social categories. Myers photographs them within the rooms they inhabit, allowing clothing, furniture, patterned wallpaper, cigarettes, slippers, cabinets and other domestic particulars to remain fully active in the frame. Expressions are often reserved; the rooms can feel quietly tense. The pictures’ emotional force accumulates through observation rather than theatrical emphasis, producing the understated, distinctly British character associated with this work.

The book’s importance lies in its concentration. Seen together, the portraits reveal recurring gestures, interiors and modes of looking that are less apparent when individual images are encountered alone. The result is not merely a selection of strong photographs but an extended account of ordinary lives in the West Midlands, preserving the specific social texture of the 1970s while placing Myers within a significant strand of British photographic practice.

For a serious collector, this Special Edition hardcover offers a coherent and substantial encounter with a photographer whose portraiture has been described by Martin Parr as “very important and under appreciated.” Its distinction is the steadiness of the gaze: small domestic details and restrained expressions are given enough time and space to suggest histories larger than the frame.