The first black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale reflects on a career challenging the racial and sexual bias behind what art hangs in galleries – and around in our memories
The Guide by John Myers published by RRB Photobooks
The Guide, John Myers. Softcover | 248mm x 285.2mm |116 pages | ISBN 9781916057579
LONDON
.-The Guide combines some of the best-loved photographs from John Myers career with his unique and wry prose on the method and theory of his work. The photographs in the book are some of most familiar images from The Portraits, Looking at the Overlooked and The End of Industry alongside five previously unpublished works. The images are published alongside insights to the circumstances behind the pictures, influences and Myers working practice, drawing the reader into conversation.
A majority of the photographs in the book were taken within walking distance of Myers home in Stourbridge on his 5 x 4 Gandolfi plate camera between 1972 and 1988. He was driven by his admiration for the work of August Sander, Diane Arbus, Eugene Atget and Walker Evans and he only ever shot approximately 1800 negatives. The photographs are a study of the mun
Sam Herman was a multi-talented artist whose work with glass, together with his influence as a teacher, freed that medium from the confines of the factory and enabled the nascent studio glass movement to flourish internationally in the 1960s and 1970s.
The combined development of a suitable glass formula and the “small furnace” first demonstrated by the studio glass pioneer Harvey Littleton at Toledo Museum of Art in 1962 allowed artists to work directly in the mercurial medium of hot, molten glass, where before they might typically have passed drawn designs to professional glassmakers, restricting their creativity. Herman studied with Littleton, and with the sculptor Leo Steppat, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he seized the opportunity, as one of Littleton’s first students, to develop studio glass techniques, and received a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Glass in 1965. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to study cold-working glass techniques with Helen M