Nowhere Newsletter 05: Harrison Miller
The whole universe is directly in front of us
Harrison Miller (b.1994) was raised in Knoxville, TN, where he lives and works. He is a writer of poetry and practitioner of photography and the craft of bookmaking. While much of his work takes place in Knoxville—focusing on the people and the fractured landscape that has surrounded him since he was a child—his eye is always turned to the unconscious world beneath the surface of everything, exposing the dynamics of humanity, our fragility, and ultimately our relationship with the earth, our neighbors, and the objects that we use to decorate our lives and take for granted the most.
What is your backstory?
I grew up in Knoxville,TN, in the same area of town I live in now, born in 1994. I make pictures and write poetry, and I keep myself open to finding how the two forms can intersect. I’ve been focused on photography exclusively for just over four years, which doesn’t sound very long but a lot has changed overtime which often makes me feel I’ve been doing it longer.
I’ve always loved cinema and explored filmmaking before photography, but photography lended itself better to how I live my life, although I tinker here and there with motion pictures and do have a desire to shift between the two forms. Writing poetry helps satisfy my more lyrical sensibilities in that way. For me it’s been gravely important to find ways to translate what living is, and what it feels like and the thoughts that go through my head and the people I meet or see.
It’s always about locating something cathartic about being alive, whether it’s the simplicity of light, the texture of grass, or a person's shape or face, focusing on details and what effect they have has been important to me and how I get through life. I like to think we all find our reason to live in things that are outside of us, something that tethers us physically to where we are.
What is ‘Sundial I’ and what is the story behind it?
‘Sundial I’ is the first book of a series that may end up being two or three volumes, but it’s not something I want to set a limit to quite yet. Sundial began with the title itself, which was disembodied from the pictures for some time before I saw the connection between what ideas “Sundial” as a word can inspire in conjunction with photographs.
Not so much the history associated with sundials, but more how they exist as objects; as something that casts a shadow, which is then symbolic of the passage of time. It’s quite a simple idea but I find the possibilities of how it can relate to our personal experience of time as humans, and in relation to how we see other people, to be nearly limitless.
It’s like a poem that keeps expanding its meaning as time progresses, which is why it’s something I want to explore in multiple books. It’s worth noting that the pictures here are of the book dummy, but the book will be available sometime between December and January and won’t have the coptic stitching like the dummy has.
Could you tell us the backstory of some of your photos?
Not to be coy, but there’s honestly not much backstory to the pictures; rather, what the photographs become is something a bit removed from the reality in which they were made. The people I’ve photographed for years either live in the same part of town as me or live around it.
Pre-virus I spent a lot of time walking and meeting my neighbors, and pestering them or their kids for a photograph, having either banal or engaging conversations. It takes a genuine interest in other people to push one to approach a stranger, but it’s always beautiful, or at the least interesting from a sociological perspective.
I used to try very hard to make pictures that somehow summarized Knoxville, TN, my home, but once I let that go and paid more attention to the universe within Knoxville, I think that’s when I began to understand the real power of knowing an area as intimately as I do here; I see worlds in other people, or a parking lot behind an abandoned Food City, or an alleyway behind a row of houses. We think of space as outside the atmosphere, but we’re in it now, and everything is finite here. The whole universe is directly in front of us, and inside us all if we allow ourselves to restructure what the universe means to us.