A Feeling for Vermonters | Peter Miller Photo Essay
For more than 50 years, Peter Miller has captured the lives of ordinary Vermonters in extraordinary photographs.
By Ian Aldrich|Feb 08 2012|
In this 1997 photograph, Fred Tuttle, a dairy farmer in Tunbridge, Vermont, holds a portrait of his father, who in turn is holding a portrait of his father. “Fred was the star of the political satire Man with a Plan. He’s a Vermont icon,” Peter Miller says. “He passed away in 2003. I wrote about his funeral, and he’s in Vermont People, along with his father.”
Credit: Peter MillerIn this 1997 photograph, Fred Tuttle, a dairy farmer in Tunbridge, Vermont, holds a portrait of his father, who in turn is holding a portrait of his father. “Fred was the star of the political satire Man with a Plan. He’s a Vermont icon,” Peter Miller says. “He passed away in 2003. I wrote about his funeral, and he’s in Vermont People, along with his father.”
Credit: Peter MillerCredit: Peter Miller Peter Miller slows his car to a stop. It’s a cloudless late-morning day in mid-June, and Miller pauses at the end of a long driveway on the outskirts of Wolcott, Vermont. The road to get here is a winding one, a route that cuts past old farms and retired pastures yellowed by acres of buttercups. It’s Miller’s home turf, so to speak–rural, unpolished in any kind of urban sense–the kind of country this longtime photographer has built a career around. And yet, as he has these last six decades, he still gets a little nervous before a shoot, even now, after all those years and all those portraits. “What the hell am I going to shoot a picture of?” he asks himself, leaning forward slightly over his steering wheel. Today’s assignment is David Budbill, a poet whose work, like Miller’s, is rooted deeply in a Vermont that’s more Northeast Kingdom than Burlington. They aren’t great friends–in fact, they hardly know each other–but Miller has long felt a kinship with Budbill’s writing, and for the last few months has been eager to photograph him.
A shot of Peacham, Vermont, from the 1980s. “I froze four toes waiting for the moon,” Miller notes.
Credit: Peter MillerCredit: Peter Miller
Deb Ravenelle of Sterling Mountain Farm in Johnson, Vermont (2000).
Credit: Miller, PeterCredit: Miller, Peter “He knows Vermont,” Miller says. “He’s very honest. He’s never been made poet laureate, and I want to know why.” The now-77-year-old Miller, who still takes pleasure in the edginess of his opinions, has his suspicions: “I think the Vermont literary mafia has blackballed him.” Miller himself has experienced the challenges of trying to bring his work to the masses. In the late 1980s he set out to publish a book that told the story, in portraits and writing, of a Vermont that was rural, connected to the land by generations, and quickly vanishing. The compilation pulled together more than 30 years of Miller’s work, all of it black-and-white. He called it, simply, Vermont People, and no book publisher would touch it. “They said it was about people who were nobodies, there wasn’t any color, and it was too regional,” he says. “I didn’t know a thing about book publishing, but that made me really mad, and so I said, ‘Godammit, I’ll publish the thing myself.'” Which he did, refinancing his farmhouse studio in Colbyville to hire a designer, bring in an editor, and pay for the printing. For a journalist whose uncompromising commitment to his craft has cost him a marriage and any semblance of a fat retirement account, it may have been the best money he ever spent. Since its debut in November 1990, Vermont People has gone through five printings and sold more than 18,000 copies.
A barn in Peacham that Miller “discovered while cross-country skiing and came back in summer” to shoot (2006)
Credit: Miller, Peter
Really enjoyable content…thank you so much!
Great keep these coming during this trying time!