Everyone has had the experience of déjà vu, the feeling of seeing something that you could not previously have seen, or of being somewhere you could not possibly have been. Psychologists have a name for it: metagnomy, the divination of knowledge of the past or present by means other than the five senses, such as extrasensory perception. Martin Miller has been exploring this elusive experience through the medium of photography for more than fifty years, producing an extraordinary body of photographic art, created through the contemplative discipline imposed by large-format cameras.
My approach owes something to both the modernist attempt to intuit universal insights and the more pragmatic, culture-oriented, postmodern approach. The latter does little to explain our remarkable creative capacities and dreams, but the former has little to do with political, social, and economic realities. Our fears seem to straddle both camps, fueled by our imaginations and by objective reality. My goal is to create work that reflects a synthesis of these rather disparate conceptual systems in order to realize more fully the nature of our human heritage.
Awards
Silver Medalist, Professional Fine-Art Architecture, 2012 Prix de la Photographie Paris
