Originally published by RRB Photobooks as part of a landmark trilogy of John Myers's work, The Portraits is here reissued in the new, affordable Documentary Classics softback format. The book gathers Myers's black-and-white portraits of his neighbours, colleagues and friends, taken in their homes, workplaces and backyards in the Black Country town of Stourbridge, all within walking distance of his front door. Myers worked with a large-format Gandolfi plate camera, lending sharpness and depth to both sitter and surroundings: the patterned wallpaper, the curtains, the kettles, the small ornaments on the mantelpiece. The portraits were not made as an August Sander–type sociological survey but quietly provide a subtle insight into the tastes, lives and pre-occupations of middle England in the 1970s. Myers can be favourably compared to American photographers Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, working independently from a different vantage on the same questions of the suburban, the everyday and the deadpan. The Documentary Classics edition aims to bring this work to a wider audience.