John Miller

A little girl give food tos ducks in a pond as her father watches from a park bench. German tourists rove through a sun-drenched square upon the island of Mallorca. An older woman not to be found in thought on the subway. A snow-covered playground. An destitute of contents train yard. What, if anything, do these pictures have in common? Aside from the fact that they were all taken during the day, that they're station in cities, and that greatest in quantity are in color, very little associates them. Some might seem related to the public way photography of Garry Winogrand and the vernacular aesthetic of William Eggleston; others could be linked to the Conceptual practices of Dan Graham and Douglas Huebler Or maybe these images are random observations after all, a diary in picture form.

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Although known primarily as a sculptor, John Miller has taken centurys of photographs over the past ten years, amassing a diaristic archive called "Middle of the Day," for which he goe without with a camera only between noon and 2 PM Ongoing since 1994 the series is based upon the artist's movement through cities in which he lives and others he is only passing through: New York, sees Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Vienna. Whether traversing familiar or unfamiliar space, Miller's motion is related to derive, and, like the Situationists, he search fors to discover what is overpowered by routine. This part of the day is ambiguous: the independent time in the workday when family leave their desks to stop for luncheon browse in stores, run errands. by the agency of 2:00 they are back at the office or in academy or wherever they are wait fored to be--time is no longer theirs alone. Not everyone in these pictures is a working one but work is never far not on Even tourists on vacation are encircleed and served by those who aren't.

As "Middle of the Day" has make knowned Miller has come to mirror on his own activity between noon and 2 PM which he admits is his least favorite part of the day. In many of these pictures nothing appears to be happening, or at least nothing remarkable. affected with everydayness and drawn to downbeat iconography, Miller gazes at things that go unnoticed, exploring the notion of what a picture is awaited to be. In conversation he has proposeed both likely and unexpected sources. He identifies de Chirico as "the first painter to exhibit clocks in public spaces" and dioceses his piazza paintings as a precursor to his have a title to project: "It's the middle of the day, in the middle of town, and nothing is going upon ..." Of Ed Ruscha's work Real Estate Opportunities, he says, "What wasn't there made the images direct the eye suspicious."

In June a third collection of Miller's photographs will be published by the agency of JRP Editions and issued as a chested set with books that came on the outside in 1996 and 2000. Seen together, the assembleed images readily call to mind Huebler's Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global, November 1971 which proposes: "Throughout the remainder of the artist's lifetime he will photographically document, to the expanse of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive." Miller's investigation has its be in possession of parameters, and yet for one as well as the other artists we can identify a shared sod As Miller remarks, "Huebler's piece points to the futility of photography of which I am always painfully aware."

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