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Garry Fabian Miller is one of today’s most progressive figures in photography whose cameraless abstractions have enriched the perception of contemporary photography within fine art. Hugh Mooney met him recently at his Dartmoor home: Garry Fabian Miller’s photographs are shining islands of light. Often combining intense colours with simple shapes they possess an extraordinary suggestive power, becoming, for the viewer, windows on a vision-inducing world of luminosity and abstraction. Fabian Miller is one of several modern artist photographers who eschew the camera. Using methods which would have been familiar to the inventors of photography who discovered long ago the magical effects of light on chemically sensitised surfaces, he manipulates light directly to produce strangely beautiful pictures in which it is both subject and medium. There is no negative and each picture is unique. His exploitation of the supreme ability of photographic materials to capture both the brilliance and the nuances of light and through that to express his reverence with its transforming powers and its associations with moments of contemplation, has brought Fabian Miller great success. Regarded as one of today’s most progressive figures in fine art photography, his work is regularly exhibited in major galleries in the UK and abroad and held in many important collections, including that of the V&A. Born in Bristol in 1957, Fabian Miller has been captivated from his earliest days by photography’s unique relationship with light. Choosing the life of the artist photographer, his first serious works were seascapes which dramatically expressed the effects of changing light and time on environment and he gained early success when, at the age of 19, his work was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London and subsequently at Bristol’s Arnolfini. A developing artistic sensibility led thereafter not only to an increasing fascination with cycles of light-driven change within nature but also to a dissatisfaction with the camera’s inability to respond to the full intensity of what he saw and felt. Abandoning the camera altogether he began using translucent plant material in his darkroom directly to cast images through the enlarger to produce artworks of great beauty, his inspiration the effects of diurnal and seasonal changes in light on the delicate structures and colours of leaves and
flowers. These were powerful metaphors for light’s role as an important shaper of landscape and his use of natural materials – light and plants – led to fruitful associations with Andy Goldsworthy and other land artists of the period. Light, however, as the progenitor of deep personal experience, emerged as his dominant obsession and in the early 1990s, his art evolved from the literal basis of his plant pictures into a practice of total abstraction in which it became the central feature. Fabian Miller’s ‘light’ is not the cold radiation of the physicist’s electromagnetic field, but light as ‘radiance’ experienced deeply and subjectively at moments of peace. The emerging glow of dawn seen on his daily walks around his home on Dartmoor, an unexpected touch of sunlight in a room or the residual light of night – such as these produce in him the feelings of clarity and presence and the heightened sense of ‘being’ which empowers his art and which he explores through the poetry of his abstractions. Working entirely in his darkroom he uses simple material: a light source, glass vessels filled with coloured fluids, shaped cardboard templates and sheets of Cibachrome colour positive photographic paper. His variables are light intensity and colour, length of exposure and the form and position of his templates, all of which he manipulates with skill. In the resulting pictures, which he develops as series of works with differing visual themes, we see areas of powerful colour as continuous fields or flowing shapes which emerge chiaroscuro-like from an intensely dark background or, in others, as strict geometrical patterns of circles, squares, annuli and lines. In some cases, comparison with the work of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly the field painters, is inevitable. For him, the pictures are a “bringing together of light and matter” and become “places to inhabit”. Recorded on the smooth continuum of Cibachrome’s fine photographic emulsion, their transparency, depth of contrast and the way in which light appears to diffuse across boundaries of colour give the impression that the forms depicted are incandescent. Not surprisingly, illustrations in books or magazines fail to capture their full intensity and impact. Each of his series is an exploration of what is possible with specific colours and colour relationships, light intensities and variations in motif. They are also experiments with time, with some exposures taking many hours. His methods are painstaking, his visual language mature and disciplined and as I listened to him I imagined the composer who uses tones, rhythms and sound textures to create great and challenging music. In fact, Fabian Miller’s series are, in a way, just that –
Garry Fabian Miller
visual music, its theme the transfiguring influence of light. Although Fabian Miller’s pictures have their source in his very personal moments they are, nonetheless, mesmerising art objects in their own right. The suggestive power of their abstraction and their visual brilliance produce a deeply emotive experience for the viewer and reviews of his work are often punctuated by references to the numinous, and by language in which words like ‘mystic’, ‘transcendent’ and ‘cosmic’ frequently appear. Fabian Miller, however, seemed guarded in speaking in such terms,
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his pictures remaining for him an almost visceral response to his feelings and best experienced, therefore, with directness and simplicity. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to avoid their evocation of the formality and stillness of a Zen garden. As I gazed at the huge and compellingly beautiful pictures hanging in his studio I experienced sensations bordering on the synaesthetic and recalled the single beat of the large gong I once heard in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. ‘Be Aware!’ it seemed to say. The subsequent silence, like Fabian Miller’s pictures, was eloquent beyond words.
The Colour of Time Garry Fabian Miller 192 pp: Black Dog Publishing, London 2010 ISBN 978 1 907317 06 4 Spring issue Close-up – Nadège Mériau
1 Year 2, Mica 4, 2007 2 Exposure (7 hours of Light), 2005 RWA magazine
Winter 2011
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