Nowhere in Particular

by Jonathan Miller.
Mitchell Beazley, London, 2001.
144 pp., illus. Cloth, $24.95.
ISBN 1-84000-150-X.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, Iowa
USA.

ballast@netins.net

While enjoying this wonderfully interesting book, one cannot help but bring to mind the writings of the Modern-era Russian art theorist Viktor Shkolovski, who said that the primary function of art is to reawaken our senses, to make us see and feel in ways that are fresh and unfamiliar. One way to accomplish this, he proposed, is to "make the familiar strange," maybe by purposely looking at things in an odd and unusual manner. Said Shkolovski: "Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life." This is a book of photographs and off-hand notebook jottings by a celebrated British physician, stage director, television producer, and author. It is filled with astonishing photographs of everyday subjects and settings that were viewed or cropped in such a way that they are very nearly unrecognizable. All of these were taken by Miller during his various travels, using only a simple camera. As a further challenge, his photographs are uncropped in the darkroom, so that what you see is what he saw as he peered through the viewfinder. As Miller explains in the introduction, like all things, such works have ancestral beginnings. For example, one may be reminded of the work of Aaron Siskind (who photographed peeling billboards), Bill Brandt (whose abstract photographs of nudes are reminiscent of desert landscapes), or the abstract scientific plates in Gyorgy Kepes‚ The New Landscape in Art and Science.
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(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter 2002-03.)