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In the spring of 2009, Richard C.
Miller’s photographic career was given long overdue recognition in the
form of an exhibition at the Getty Museum. As a
practitioner of the exceptionally stable color process known as carbro
printing, Miller’s work was positioned adjacent to an exhibit of one of
the masters of that technique-- Paul Outerbridge. Carbro printing, a
difficult and time-consuming process requiring the layering of cyan,
magenta and yellow pigment separations, was exploited by Outerbridge
and Miller for both commercial and fine art applications. In
fact, a career breakthrough occurred for Miller in 1941 when he
submitted a carbro print to the Saturday Evening Post. The
image depicted his daughter Linda praying at the Thanksgiving table
while peaking at the turkey. It became one of the first color
photographs to displace Norman Rockwell on the magazine’s cover.
Miller’s color work from the 1940s included several other similarly
staged scenes such as Linda being surprised by a chick popping out of
an Easter egg that she’s painting, as well as nudes, still-lifes, a
series of women in wildly colorful, feathery, and fruit-laden hats, and
dozens of images of a young model named Norma Jeane Dougherty (who
later became Marilyn Monroe.)
Miller’s black and white work was
equally significant, and in some ways, ahead of its time. From
1948-1953 he photographed the building of the Hollywood Freeway, not on
assignment or for other commercial purposes, but because he was in awe
of its monumentality. As he said, “…this is how the people must
have felt when they first saw cathedrals in Europe…the first day the
four-level opened, I drove around and around just to experience
it.” The early images of construction, however, are more about
displacement, bulldozed neighborhoods, and dirt fields scattered with
construction debris and random dying foliage. Writing about this
body of work, the author Judith Freeman noted that, “no one was making
pictures like these back then, and no one would have appreciated them
at the time. In Miller’s photographs we find the precursor to the
work of the New Topographic photographers Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and
Joe Deal.”
In addition to his carbro work and
Hollywood Freeway photos, the exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will
include a trove of vintage pictures from the 1930s-50s of Los Angeles
at night, the city’s grand boulevards, self-portraits boxing, the Good
Humor Man, beaches, parking lots, gas stations, Steinbeckian views of
the Central Valley, James Dean on and off the set of Giant, a
selection of striking portraits including some of his best friend Brett
Weston, costume parties at Edward Weston’s Wildcat Hill, pictures made
while driving, the dunes at Oceano, and aviation photos made while
working at North American.
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