Francis Miller - Portrait of Joy 1956

from Scimparello N°4 - Summer 2020

BY PATRIZIA MEZZANZANICA PHOTO FRANCIS MILLER

Francis Miller 1905-1973, American photographer of the magazine Life and native of Texas, was nicknamed Nig for his shootings on African American rights.

**Photo by Francis Miller / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images**

Pet Therapy. It all started one day in 1953 by accident. An autistic patient of Dr. Levinson, a child psychiatrist, happens to meet Jungles, the doctor’s dog, who comes up to him and licks him. The child, not at all frightened, caresses him and establishes with him the first emotional relationship of his life.

Francis Miller must have been an oddball. I didn’t find much about him on internet (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page) but from the little has been published and I could read I got the idea of a man with an adventurous life who certainly didn’t lack character, for better or for worse. But I do know one thing, and I know it because I saw his photographs, not just those of this shooting but others taken mostly for Life magazine: Francis Miller was a great photographer. One of the biggest. One of those you look at his pictures and you stare at them, and you don’t even know why. You just know that you can’t easily turn the page.

That everyone he shoots, they could be actors, murderer, mafiosi, politicians, sportsmen, ordinary people, children, elder, women, men, good or bad persons the always have in their eyes something that is halfway between disturbing and total normality. And even though he portrays a crowd, all faces resemble each other, not because they are really similar but because they are crossed by the same emotion. The one that also broadcast to you, watching them from a computer screen 50 or 60 or even 70 years after he shot them.

One of his archive pic was taken in Chicago on January the 1st 1960 and shows a store robbed by policemen, so at least the title recites because in the picture everything seems to be fine. There is snow on the sideway and only one person on the street, and it is a black and white, picture, and on the wall of the building next door there are two large posters that should have attracted my attention but I can’t remember what they advertise, because what it really stuck in my head is the atmosphere of that photo. Like a painting of Hopper. A moment of life fixed in a frame where nothing is special and yet everything is poetry. Then there are the photos of Martin Luther King during the famous I have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in August 1963, and they are definitely intense but I think not making Dr King intense was kind of difficult.

What it wasn’t easy, not easy at all, was to communicate the sense of that march after everyone had gone. After the huge crowd with all its energy had dissolved. Maybe It’s just because I like the after-pictures, the ones are taken when the parties end and the rooms are upside down, or the dinner are over and the tables are cluttered with dirty dishes; however, there’s a picture he took that day that I find one of his best: a woman, exhausted, sitting disorderly on the marble staircase of the Lincoln Memorial with no shoes on. All around papers trash and feelings of abandonment and yet in his photo you feel that something glorious just happened there. You feel it so strong and so deeply that you are there. You too. Being part of history. And he was him who brought you. Few photographers know how to do this. Very, very few.

And what about this wonderful shooting we publish which he shot in a children’s hospital that treated its little patients with a method that believed animals could help them to feel better? Did you take a good look at the children eyes, their standing walk, their smiles? Do you think he asked them to pose? I’m sure he did not. He was a reporter. He captured what he felt. He would got probably upset if someone had suggested it to him. We do not know if the idea of this shooting was his or if it was commissioned by Life magazine but I like to imagine that he proposed it. However, even if that was not the case, I am sure he liked it. Because we all, in our editorial office, got his message loud and clear.

Beauty must be felt in order to be portrayed.

This article is from:

Scimparello N°4 - Summer 2020