Backstage Pass – John Miller

John Miller exhibited with Spruce Peak Arts in Altered Spaces, 2019. During this time of quarantine, Miller’s work in the studio has been a time of retrospection and gathering older series of images for future book projects. He has been producing many contact sheets – imagery for which was produced over the past 25 years.

 

Working the past winter/spring, particularly during Covid quarantine, I have been reassessing photography done since the late 1960s with plan to produce a number of exhibits as part of a larger retrospective based around a number of themes, yet also working styles from straight documentary work, portrait series, experimental work of combines/collage/montage both in gelatin silver and digital. Also spanning black and white as well as color work.

Black and white primarily are examples of photographing people in their environment and one from winter while teaching the winter spring semester in Denver, Colorado.

 
 
Over the past months I have made digital scans of most of my color and black and white negative sheets to assist viewing enlarged imagery on the computer and to rough out a number of book concepts. This is a large task for there are thousands of photographs to review, yet the process has been illuminating and revealing in terms of reflecting upon my past, friendships with wonderful people long gone, and trips out of the country to spend extended periods of time observing with camera in places as Italy, Oaxaca Mexico, regions of Spain as well as diverse regions across the United States. All contacts are from medium and large format cameras spanning close to 50 years.

 
 

Color examples are of both abandoned homes in the western prairie and new tract development along the front range mountains in Colorado.