Since establishing himself as a critically acclaimed landscape photographer in the 1970s, Fabian Miller has reinvented himself as an artist specializing in camera-less, darkroom-produced photographic images exploring the elements of light, time, and color in a notably spare, but also vividly spiritual aesthetic style which recalls elements of Modernism and intuitive scientific exploration. Fabian Miller exposes light directly onto photographic paper through substances such as plants, engine oil, cut-paper shapes, glass and water. The methods used in the capturing of Fabian Miller’s artworks means that they are nearly impossible to accurately reproduce, resulting in one of a kind, strikingly luminous pieces; a record of light’s behavior caught on photographic paper.
The Colour of Time features images personally retouched under the artist’s direction, and therefore provides the most accurate printed representation of his work: The pictures I make are of nothing which exists in the world…. What I am trying to suggest is a state of mind which lifts the spirits and gives strength and some kind of clarity.
The Colour of Time is split into three key sections. In the first section, noted academic philosopher Nigel Warburton provides an overview of Fabian Miller’s work to date, including pieces which were created prior to his landmark Year 1, October 2005-October 2006. Year 1 is Fabian Miller’s documentation through the passage of a year, with Fabian Miller creating a daily image, with results that vary from gentle to radical. The book features examples of artworks from all of the artist’s recent works, including Year 2 and later series, as well as pictures of Fabian Miller’s work in the context of various gallery exhibitions.
The latter sections of the book more directly cover the periods of 2007-2008 and 2009-present. The second section encompasses full color plates of examples of work from the series Year 2. The artwork plates are prefixed with an introductory essay by novelist, mythologist and cultural historian Marina Warner. The final chapter is preceded with an introductory text by eminent travel writer and historian, Adam Nicolson, whose essay The Otherworld focuses on the prominence of the concept of night-time nothingness and the inexorable links between the notion of an otherworld, the natural world, and the human psyche in Fabian Miller’s work.
Garry Fabian Miller has a deserved reputation as one of the most progressive artists working with photography today and The Colour of Time is a beautifully reproduced overview and welcome addition to the published work of the artist’s progressive and affecting recent output.