John Myers’s *Looking at the Overlooked* turns the photographer’s immediate surroundings in Stourbridge into the setting for a precise study of ordinary vision. Made within walking distance of his home, the photographs attend to shops, houses, substations, televisions, and unremarkable stretches of landscape: places repeatedly encountered, yet seldom granted the status of a subject.
The book’s method is deliberately restrained. Myers photographs without an imposed story or conspicuous emotional cue, approaching each scene as if it were newly discovered. The sequence moves through a town, but avoids the claims of local reportage or a specific geography. Stourbridge becomes generic by design—a framework for considering how repetition dulls attention, and how an impartial gaze can make familiar surroundings newly legible.
Published by RRB PhotoBooks in 2019, the volume is the second part of a projected three-book presentation of Myers’s collected work. Its importance within that sequence lies in its concentration: rather than treating the everyday as picturesque or dramatic, it tests what photography can do when it refuses embellishment. For a serious collector, the book offers a sustained encounter with a distinctive photographic attitude—one grounded in patience, formal clarity, and an exacting interest in what ordinarily escapes notice. This is the special-edition hardcover, a 160-page English-language publication, issued in signed and numbered form with a stated limited edition of 450 copies.
