Garry Fabian Miller’s Dark Room is a photography book unlike any other. At its heart is the artist’s description of a life lived making pictures between the dark and the light, a deeply personal account woven against the history of photography from the moment of its birth in the 1830s to its decline, and some would say death, in the digital age almost two hundred years later.
It is a memoir that reads at times like a manifesto, at others like a confession; a last testament to the dark room as both a site for the imagination, and a physical space for the alchemy that William Henry Fox Talbot once described as ‘a little bit of magic realised’. Dark Room charts Miller’s work over five decades, shifting from a camera-based practice in early career to the abstract picture making for which he has become internationally recognised, working without a camera to experiment with the possibilities of light as both medium and subject.
At its core is the relationship with nature and place that has so sustained his way of life, and specifically with his home on Dartmoor and the cycle of daily walks that have been at the core of his practice for thirty years.
The book also features an essay on Miller’s work by his friend the potter and writer Edmund de Waal and technical notes by Martin Barnes, senior photography curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum.