The World is Not Beautiful gathers John Myers's photographs of urban environments, substations, brick walls, telegraph poles, bus shelters, fences, slabs of pavement, bedspreads—the overlooked structures and surfaces that he made in and around Stourbridge across the seventies and into the eighties. Like Myers's portraits, these images were made within walking distance of his front door, with a Gandolfi plate camera, and with the same patient frontal approach. The book includes several pieces of scholarly writing on Myers's importance in the history of British photography and on how, despite the strong affinities with American New Topographics, his work was for a long time overlooked outside a small circle. There is also a special, inexpensive RRB edition with a signed and numbered small silverprint. Where his portraits offer the people, this book offers the place: a Midlands town in the last decades of the twentieth century, photographed with the deadpan attention that gives modest subjects unexpected weight. The title is borrowed from a remark of Myers's own about the world he saw around him, which he photographed not to glorify but simply to describe.