Garry Fabian Miller : Recent work

"This was made in the summer of 2019 when I decided to bring two colours, two circles together, and at the point of where they overlap, they mix a third colour. Across this picture the beam of light passed through a red water-filled vessel to meet a beam of light passed through a blue water-filled vessel, and where the two overlap, make a third exposure, mixing to make the colour pink. Orange is where green & red mix, and green & blue mix to make this strange aqua colour. So, this is a process of mixing colour in the dark room, through the beam of light which activates the colour palette that is impregnated in the Cibachrome paper."

- Garry Fabian Miller, 2020

Our first encounter with Garry Fabian Miller’s work was in 1997 when the Arnolfini in Bristol showed his project Sections of England, the Sea Horizon, the extraordinarily precocious body of work that Miller had begun 20 years previously, aged just 19. At the time I was working as an art critic for The Independent newspaper, whilst Florence and I worked out how to start the gallery, and as I wrote in a review of that exhibition - the Arnolfini was “…an appropriate venue for Garry Fabian Miller's exhibition, not least because of the gallery's physical proximity to the place overlooking the Severn Estuary where this work was made, but also for the role that the Arnolfini has played in Miller's personal history”. Bristol was his hometown, where, as a young man, he briefly managed his family’s photography business, and where, at the Arnolfini in 1976, he saw ‘Artists Over Land’: an exhibition including work by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton which led him to ideas of ‘place’ and to the experiments with landscape photography that followed.

This extensive series of photographs of the horizon bisecting sea and sky were made with a conventional camera fixed to a static point on the roof of the house where he lived at Clevedon, looking west across the estuary towards the coast of Wales. They were taken at irregular intervals over a period of 18 months with the subject, format and photographic technicalities of lens and film, all remaining constant, so that all that changes from one image to the next is the time of day and the weather.  It's an amazing body of work that would be worthy of note at any point in an artist’s career, but for someone who was still a teenager it represents a staggeringly mature achievement. After showing a few examples in 1977 (including at the Arnolfini and the Serpentine Gallery in London) the series all but vanished for two decades before being rediscovered in the nineties by curators at the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, struck by its anticipation of ideas that were by then associated with a number of other artists (Hiroshi Sugimoto's work on the same theme, for example, didn't emerge until a decade later). 

Those intervening decades saw him put the camera aside and emerge as one of the leading experimental photographers of our time, exploring the first principles of photography as pioneered in the 1830s – through the action of light on light-sensitive paper - to make works of gathering complexity and intensity. Since 1985 he has made these ‘camera-less’ images on Cibachrome paper, 'positive' photographic paper coated in layers of red, blue and green dyes - the three primaries of light from which all other colours come. The image is found by manipulating a beam of light on its way from source to the surface of the paper, sending it through glass vessels and coloured liquids, using objects and constructions to make shapes that both allow light through, and block it out. Each work is unique, made in the dark often with enormously long exposures, effectively a leap of faith guided by the knowledge of past experiments with the results unseen until being developed.

The importance of place, of rootedness, continues to motivate Garry’s work four decades after those first Sea Horizons.  For the past 3o years, he has lived and worked on Dartmoor in a studio darkroom and home that he has shared with his family, high on the moor where he walks every day in pursuit of the moments of light that sustain and guide his way of seeing the world. As he said in a recent interview in the Journal of the Royal Society of Photography – "Landscape, Home: These are the sites from which my pictures come.  The primary focus of my life is my relationship with the sun - all my adult life has been based around its arrival and its end, and how I engage with it across the day."

Light is his subject, and also his medium, but in recent years he has had to accept that that the tools which have allowed his life of experimental picture making are fast disappearing. The photography industry’s shift to digital means that his paper and processing fluids ceased production some time ago, and so, like other artists whose work relies on these analogue methods, Garry stockpiled supplies. Over the last few years, he has eked these out in what he has come to define as an endgame in which the materials themselves are playing an active role - the now corrupted chemistry leading to dissolving and unexpected images.

Over the last decade, in parallel to the extinction of his precious Cibachrome, he has embraced a new way of working in collaboration with the photographer and colour scanning specialist John Bodkin, a decade, as Garry describes it “spent exploring and connecting the worlds of chemical and digital colour space”. Bodkin’s understanding of new technologies, and in particular the Lambda c-print process has introduced the possibility of a new kind of camera-less image making on a larger scale, capturing the last Cibachrome experiments in a new paper that turns out to have exactly the same qualities (particularly in the ability to hold a balance between solid and fluid colour) as the originating Cibachrome print.

The idea of these new works, and indeed of Garry Fabian Miller as an artist, as a bridge between old technologies, old learning if you like, and new possibilities, is an important thing to grasp. He continues to pursue new methods of making in a truly pioneering way, even whilst the materials on which he depends come to an end. The commitment of various important institutions including the V&A in London (home of the National Photography Collection) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, to a next chapter in which he continues to find ways to work meaningfully beyond the lifetime of his medium, brings us to a place of new possibilities. Almost certainly the future will involve a further step back in order to move forward and his research has already begun into a new kind of colour production which looks to Ethel Mairet’s research into planted colour which culminated in her 1916 publication A Book on Vegetable Dyes. Fittingly, this brings us back to the context of land art in which Garry first started, but this time with a project that involves planting Three Acres of Colour – a proposal to grow the primary colours in the English landscape. That’s a story which will continue to unfold, but at its heart is what Garry’s describes as his ‘deep kinship’ with Mairet’s view that “strong and beautiful colour is an essential to the full joy of life”. It is a code by which he has lived his life, and which is perfectly expressed by these latest works.