Graham Miller
Deliberately moving away from traditional documentary aesthetics, Miller utilises a more directorial and conceptual approach, using photography as a tool of imaginative exploration rather than a reactive mechanical process for recording reality. “I’m interested in the ambiguity of images. The way that all photographs have an element of both truth and fiction.”
His series the The Performance of Everyday Life (2000) was included in the show New Australiana for The Festival of Sydney (2001) and toured throughout Australia. These portraits celebrate the eccentricity of Australian suburbia, where everyday people are encouraged to perform for the camera amongst the cluttered debris of their lounge rooms and backyards.
Images from the series with the working title Suburban Melancholy were first exhibited at The Church Gallery in Perth in 2005, with additions to the series seen as part of FotoFreo 2006. These images are poignant, theatrical set pieces capturing isolated individuals in everyday suburban settings, whose ambiguous narratives deliver a powerful emotional charge and invoke bitter truths that are piercing, insightful and very real.
(Graham Miller 2006)
