Garry Fabian Miller: Blaze

The first monograph in almost a decade on one of the most significant abstract photographers working today

Garry Fabian Miller is one of the most progressive artists working with photography today. He gained international acclaim in the 1970s for his photographs of sky, land and sea. Since the mid-1980s, he has exclusively made ‘camera-less’ photographs, using the techniques of the earliest pioneers of photography to experiment with the nature and possibilities of light as medium and subject. He works in the darkroom, shining light through coloured glass and liquid and over cut paper to create forms that record directly onto photographic paper. In contrast to the norm of exposures that last for a fragment of a second, Fabian Miller often uses long exposure times – of up to twenty hours – to create his unique and luminous images. With his interest in pure light and ‘true colour’, he not only realigns photography with abstraction, but also takes the medium back to a degree-zero state of process.

Blaze presents recent work by Fabian Miller made during the anxious period when the materials and chemistry that have sustained his practice for nearly forty years have been disappearing. It also represents a step forward in his examination of the potential of digital technology that has rendered his Cibachrome printmaking obsolete.

The book includes forty-five works made in the last four years that represent what fellow artist Edmund de Waal identifies as an ‘endgame’. De Waal brings the moment of Blaze into focus in an introductory essay and meditation on the word itself and on ideas about ‘late work’ in the life of a maker. A poem by the award-winning poet Alice Oswald written in response to the works in the book completes this beautiful volume.