Bloomington, IN (10)

About the Photographer

Miller, Tyagan

American, b.1952

Since 1992 Tyagan Miller has primarily made photographic essays that deal with various social issues in places throughout the United States. In the fall of 2003 he began working on a series of landscape photographs, titled Eminent Domains, which document trees that have been pruned or dramatically truncated to avoid telephone and power lines. The photographs track human interventions in the landscape and examine the intersections of privately-owned and publicly-held land. Miller stresses that these photographs are not meant “to draw us nearer their subject to elicit sympathy or action,” but rather to “point quietly toward a particular sorrow.” The pictures in the series were primarily shot in the Midwest, near to the artist’s southern Indiana home. Tyagan Miller received a BA in philosophy and English and American literature from University of Southern Indiana (1986) and an MA in English and American literature from Indiana University (1988). He founded his own photography company in 1993 to facilitate advertising and editorial assignments, and from 1998 to 2005 he was a lecturer at Indiana University’s School of Journalism in Bloomington.