Intimations

Everyone has had the experience of d?j? vu, the feeling of seeing something that you could not previously have seen, of being somewhere you could not possibly have been, or experiencing something you really have not experienced. For most, it is a curious, slightly uncomfortable sensation that is quickly forgotten. For photographer Martin Miller, it is the source of an aesthetic, an inspirational but elusive butterfly that has the power to evoke strong visual responses from ordinary subjects. He likens the response to the physical phenomena of resonance in which favorable circumstances can magnify sounds or light. He suggests that it might be possible that certain forms and textures could be resonating with deep evolutionary experience encoded in our DNA, just as instinctive behavior is encoded in a manner that we cannot yet decipher. Such a mechanism would act outside our consciousness and normally be masked by the conscious meaning ordinarily associated with the subject. Regardless of how plausible one may regard such speculations, Miller's explorations of these evanescent experiences over the last fifty years have produced an extraordinary body of photographic art, created through the contemplative discipline imposed by large-format cameras and stunningly reproduced here using advanced stochastic half-toning for amazing detail and tonal subtleties.

--Bronze Medal Winner, Fine-Art Book Category, 2022 PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Paris