Garry Fabian Miller
October 28 – December 23, 2010
Garry Fabian Miller was born in Bristol, England in 1957. His works are in the collections of major art museums internationally, and he is currently featured in the Victoria and Albert's much anticipated show on contemporary cameraless photography, "Shadow Catchers" (along with Susan Derges, Adam Fuss, Pierre Cordier, and Floris Neususs). One of Britain's best known contemporary photographers, Fabian Miller's work has been the subject of several monographs, including Illumine (2005), Year One (2007), and The Colour of Time (2010).
Fabian Miller's earliest work explored the abstract possibilities of landscape. His minimal sky and seascapes of 1976 first brought him to the attention of the photography world and indeed pre-date similar work by Hiroshi Sugimoto by several years. He has worked without a camera since 1984 and is now best known for the purity and minimalism of his darkroom abstractions. These bold experiments in light and color continue to push the boundaries of the photographic medium. They place him within a movement building since the late 1980's of British photographers who have taken the art of the photogram into ever more novel, interesting, and technically and conceptually challenging territory.
Fabian Miller's recent cameraless images are atypical to the genre in that they do not depict the forms of recognizable objects. He works with cardboard stencils and glass vessels filled with oil and water to create abstract forms in color. Fabian Miller uses highly light-sensitive cibachrome photographic paper for its clarity and high color saturation. Working in total darkness, he arranges these objects before the paper and exposes it to light from a photographic enlarger for lengths of time ranging from minutes to many hours. Out of these simple tools he creates otherworldly, seemingly perfect forms that both engage and obscure their photographic making.
Danziger Projects' exhibition focuses largely on the recently created body of work titled "Year Two". Following the form of a previous body of work titled "Year One", Fabian Miller devoted himself to making ten pictures a month - each month exploring how individual elements such as color, edge, and border affect a specific geometric composition. Looking at these images, the rigorous exploration of form, color, light and pattern that he has undertaken becomes apparent. He pairs a craftsman's skill with an almost spiritual reverence for light and in the process takes photographic abstraction into a wholly original dimension - a place of creation rather than observation. The resulting images transport us to someplace new while welcoming meditation and reflecting the cerebral process that underlies all of Fabian Miller's work.