NOTES ON GARRY FABIAN MILLER, 25 YEARS ON, BY RICHARD INGLEBY

We first encountered Garry Fabian Miller’s work 25 years ago, in 1997, when the Arnolfini in Bristol exhibited 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’, whilst we worked out how to start the gallery that would open the following year. 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 the summer of 1975, he saw ‘Artists Over Land’: an exhibition which included work by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, which led him to ideas of ‘place’ and to the experiments with landscape photography that followed.

Not surprisingly perhaps, for an artist who was still so young, the Sea Horizons proved a hard act to follow and for several years Miller struggled to find an equivalent way of working. During this time, he looked with increasing intensity at the natural world, in particular focussing on snow and ice, and then on mosses, algae and plant life (a very rare hand-printed folio publication titled Green Grain containing 19 photographs was released in 1984 by Garry’s own short-lived independent publishing venture The Reed Press, ostensibly in an edition of 6, although Garry has since admitted that only two or three of the folios were ever assembled).

In 1985 Miller made a radical step - giving up the camera altogether and putting the plant form itself directly in line with a source of light so that its form and colour was transferred onto a piece of light sensitive (Cibachrome) paper.  And so began his experiments into camera-less photography, taking the first principles of photography as pioneered by the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s - the action of light on light-sensitive paper - to make works of growing and gathering complexity. The science of this is quite simple. Miller uses 'positive' photographic paper that has been coated in layers of dyes (red, blue, green - the three primaries from which all other colours can be made) and by manipulating a beam of light on its way from source to the surface of the paper (sending it through coloured liquids to pick up 'pure' colour and then through objects and constructions to make shapes that allow light through, or block sections to keep it out). The works made in the darkroom in this way are unique, one of a kind, prints - each new experiment effectively a leap of faith guided by the knowledge of past, but with the results unseen until being developed. In this way he often works in series, making small changes from one day to the next, often with enormously long exposures.

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 made on a larger scale, capturing the last Cibachrome experiments in a new paper that turns out to have 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 support of various important institutions, including the V&A in London (home of the National Photography Collection) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, at this moment 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 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. Amongst the final works made on Cibachrome in the dark room are those that he has collectively titled The Ark – an exploration of the three primary colours through exposures of vastly differing lengths – a repository of colour knowledge to take forward into the future.

The next chapter belongs to 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 own life, and which is perfectly expressed by these latest works.