Garry Fabian Miller: BLAZE

A new book BLAZE, introduced by internationally acclaimed artist and writer Edmund De Waal and closed with a new poem by Alice Oswald (published by Ingleby in October 2019) will document the end of an era as the artist battles with the extinction of the analogue materials in a digital age. Dwindling supplies of paper and chemistry and the increasingly fugitive nature of his life-learnt methods see Miller embracing the perversity of his position in a final blaze of picture-making glory. As De Waal comments:

Blaze is the word for manifesto – words and ideas to start a fire with. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Malevich’s writings. Kandinsky on colour. I think of the blaze of “Die Fackel’, the Torch, a blaze of red to set light to Vienna in the early part of the last century. Blaze is anger. And tenderness. And loyalty too: those emotions that are tinder-dry, unpredictable, unsearched-for and costly. The latest body of work by Garry Fabian Miller blazes.

For the past thirty-five years Miller has worked without a camera using the techniques of early nineteenth century photographic exploration to experiment with the possibilities of light as both medium and subject. The journey from his earliest camera-less photographs (looking back to the pioneers of photography in the 1830s by passing light through leaves onto light-sensitive paper) to these final searing abstractions ends in an explosion of radiant and luminous brilliance, bringing to a close one of the most distinctive bodies of photographic work of recent years.

These late works will be the subject of an exhibition; Midwinter Blaze, at Ingleby, Edinburgh from 12 October – 20 December 2019.