“I’m interested in the ambiguity of images. The way that all photographs have elements of fabrication and truth making.”
Graham Miller
Over the last seven years Australian photographer Graham Miller has produced a refined and evocative photographic record of the suburban and urban experience through his series Suburban Splendour and Waiting for the Miracle.
Suburban Splendour emerged from encounters observed whilst driving, from focused observation of daily life, from eavesdropping and casual conversation, but more often than not the photographs were inspired by literature and cinema. Films by Paul Thomas Anderson and Ray Lawrence contributed, as did writing by Richard Ford and the lyrics of Paul Kelly. But the background soundtrack that remained constant was the voice of the American short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s vision depicts ordinary blue collar people living lives of quiet desperation, people who are feeling their way in the dark with the hope that maybe next week things will get better. Choreographed through the careful management of performance, light and environment, these “visual short stories” are nuanced understated narratives that are compelling and open. Carver’s work explores the human frailty, everyday struggle and disconnection simmering just below the surface of the suburban experience and the compressed cinematic frames of Suburban Splendour articulate something of the soft lament that Carver alludes to.
Extending on ideas explored in Splendour, the series Waiting for the Miracle combines constructed images with portraits from encounters with strangers on the street. Less cinematic and more documentary in style, this work is fluid and ambiguous, exploring narrative not only within the frame, but in the interplay between images. Here, young protagonists “cling precariously, but tenaciously to a sense of possibility hope and resolve” (Robert Adams Beauty in Photography). In both series there is the sense that these people are survivors. Troubled, but not irretrievably lost; they carry a kind of dignified endurance and a sense of bruised optimism. They have a desire, as we all do, to be transported from darkness into light.
After leaving school Graham Miller studied Veterinary Science, but after working for seven years as a vet, he returned to university to study film and photography at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, graduating with a double major. In 2002 he was one of the co-founders of FotoFreo, a bienniel international festival of photography in Fremantle which has become one the most important photo festivals in Australia. He teaches part-time as a photographic lecturer in the Photomedia program at Edith Cowan University and continue to work part time as a veterinarian. In 2008 he was shortlisted in the final six for the Critical Mass Photolucida Prize and nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographic work is produced primarily for the art market and is included in major photographic collections in Australia and in the US. Graham Miller is a photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally and throughout Australia, including the Haggerty Museum USA, Pingyao International Festival of Photography China, Rencontres Photographique Internationale de Niort France, Kaunas Photo Lithuania, F/Stop Festival Leipzig Germany, Yokohama Photography Festival Japan, the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Photography Gallery of Western Australia.
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