John Myers – The End of Industry

I have already expressed my deep admiration and liking for the photography of John Myers. Almost everything I have done over the last 12 months shows his influence. 

The End of Industry is the third and final volume of his work published by RRB books a few weeks ago and it completes his catalogue raisonné. 

The photographs in The End of Industry were all taken between 1981 and 1988 in the ‘Black Country’, West Midlands. As it happens, I was working in the Black Country, as a social work manager, between 1983 and 1989, first in Dudley and then in Walsall.

It’s difficult to describe the Black Country to those who don’t know it. One thing it isn’t, is Birmingham (nor Wolverhampton). It’s not marked on a map and its boundaries are informal and sometimes disputed. Traditionally, the term refers to the towns built where a 30 ft coal seam came to the surface and includes West Bromwich, Cosely, Dudley, Tipton, Wednesbury and Walsall. Even if it is geographically ill-defined, its accent, its sharp, defiant humour and its own sense of a distinctive cultural tradition were strongly present during the 1980s when I knew it. 

By then, it had lost many of those features of the built environment that gave it its name; the 441 coal pits, 181 blast furnaces, 118 iron works, 79 rolling mills and 1500 forges producing wrought iron that caused Elihu Burritt, the American Consul to Birmingham in 1862, to describe the area as ‘Black by day and red by night’. Throughout the middle and later decades of the industrial revolution, the Black Country’s factories and foundries and particularly the hundreds of ‘domestic’ scale household forges producing nails and chains had amalgamated and rationalised but, economically speaking, the area remained defined by metal bashing.

In a short afterword to his book, Myers notes how the 1980s saw the globalisation of the metal working industry and, consequently, the decimation of those communities throughout Europe and North America that earned their living from it. With production and manufacturing moving overseas,

“Foundries, forges and steelworks – not easily transformed into industrial units or office space – quickly morphed into housing estates, enterprise zones or retail parks.
The change was rapid and irreversible. A landscape that had been formed by the Industrial Revolution disappeared.” 

(Myers, 2019. Afterword.)

While it is important to understand the structural origins of this ‘rapid and irreversible’ change and the title of the book may suggest a repost to Fukuyama’s now widely criticised and  ‘misplaced triumphalism’ in his ‘end of history’ thesis, what Myers does is to show the fine detail of this transformation. The End of Industry offers a close up view of what he quite properly identifies in the book as “one of the major changes to British landscape and society in the last half of the twentieth century”.  

There is a definite elegiac, melancholic, tone to the book that is typical of Myers’ work. The use of scarce natural light, long exposures and the great depth of field that Myer’s Gandolfi camera produced make sure that the people in these pictures appear still, calm – and deeply embedded in their workplaces:

There are echoes here of the photographs taken in front rooms in Myers’ The Portraits (2018) but the calmness here is one of resignation as well as quiet dignity and they are viewed in the knowledge that their livelihoods, economic security and aspirations will soon be swept to one side:

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From John Myers, The Portraits, 2018. RRB Books.

Elsewhere, Myers subtly juxtaposes images, not always sequentially, to show what happens once the fires are extinguished in the hearths and how quickly dereliction turns into disorder and decay:

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In an ironic reflection of the Bechers, Myers also depicts the literal and metaphorical fall of the giant structures that once dominated the horizon, suddenly reduced to mere scrap:

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Or worse, stripped of their power and reduced to empty signifiers of what has been destroyed:

If there can be said to be a narrative arc to the book, its turning point is the photographs  of the piles of rubble to which so much of the industrial infrastructure of the Black Country was turned during this period. On at least one side of those magnificent gates, all has returned to dust:

The narrative upturn seems to lie in the redevelopment of the brown land left when the rubble is cleared but the prospect seems to rest more on hope than experience:

Where tangible investment is made, the ‘units’ on the industrial estates look as well built and thoughtfully designed as the boxes being built on the associated residential estates:

This process Myers describes as “the end of manufacturing and the emergence of the world of warehousing, logistics, retailing and tarmac” (Myers, 2019). He does this in a characteristically humane way and he does not romanticise nor idealise what is lost. His is a compassionate but sharp eyed gaze. 

From my experience at the time, in the legacy of chronic ill health, failing infrastructure and  weakening social bonds, the Black Country, owed too much to its past. There was no future for the Black Country in the political economy of the ‘rust belt’ then, anymore than there is now for those rust belt states in the US that have produced such self-defeating rightwing populism.

In some small way, I am beginning to think that I am photographing the end of the hollowed out form of industrial labour that Myers saw succeeding to the derelict sites of the first industrial revolution.

As the industrial revolution 2.0 gathers momentum those sectors where employment is most at risk through developments in information technology and AI are precisely ‘warehousing, logistics and retailing’ (see Frey, 2019, for an accessible and persuasive account of the ‘technology trap’).

This is not to argue against what David Landes once called “the ingenuity of scientists and engineers [who] will always generate new ideas to relay the old” (Landes, 1969) nor to  recuse myself from the materialist dialectic. Quite the opposite. The fault lies not in the ingenuity of the species nor in the technologies of production but in the belief, expressed by Landes, that,

“.. there is no assurance that those men charged with utilising these ideas will do so intelligently [and] there is no assurance that noneconomic exogenous factors – above all, man’s incompetence in dealing with his fellow man – will not reduce the whole magnificent structure to dust.”

(Landes, 1969 p. 4)

The industrial estate as it was developing in the 1980s may already have reached its zenith, as the post-war history of Trafford Park would suggest. The sheds are getting bigger as the workforce gets smaller and the employment more precarious. 

Myers’ view was close, intimate although never naive. My view is more distant, more sceptical and more overtly instrumental. In observing the end of what came after the end of industry, I am looking at a world, in Frey’s terms, “where technology creates few jobs and enormous wealth” and where the challenge, in his view, is essentially a “distributional one” (Frey, 2019 p. 366). In truth, the ‘challenge’ has always been a ‘distributional’ one; with the distribution historically working more to the advantage of a few than the many, as Myers so beautifully and sadly demonstrates.

Industries come and go but the struggle continues.

References

Frey, C.B. (2019) The Technology Trap. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
Landes, D.S. (1969) The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press