Brian David Kahehtowanen Miller, photographer, Orford

Brian David Kahehtowanen Miller was born in Greece, New York and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Purchase College of the State University of New York, and his Master of Fine Arts at Yale University. While attending Yale he was a Philip Morris/Ford Foundation Fellow and received the George Saker Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography. Miller has extensive exhibition experience from the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Banff Arts Centre in Alberta, The Woodlands Cultural Centre in Ontario, the Juanita Kreps Gallery at Duke University and locally at Dartmouth College and Plymouth State College.

Currently, Miller teaches photography at Dartmouth College and lectures at various Art Centers and Universities throughout the Northeast and Canada. His works are a part of permanent, public collections at the State University of New York, Yale University and the Smithsonian Institute.

Along with the slides Miller submitted for his Fellowship application, he submitted a narrative about a mysterious engagement with a hitchhiker along Route 25C near Orford, NH (see below for excerpt). He shoots with a 12x20 View Camera and a modified 8x10 View Camera. Miller strives to combine his love of old country music into the emotions and simplicity of his black and white photographs. One could say that the simplicity of the newly revived Shape Note singing is echoed in his photographs and his storytelling.

Miller's middle name, Kahehtowanen, is his Mohawk name. He looks forward to his annual visits to his family's reservation in Canada.

An excerpt from Brian Miller's narrative:

"One night after dinner she told me that she had to leave. I knew that this was coming and that there was nothing I could do to stop her. I asked where she would go and she said she just wanted to go back to that spot of Route 25C were I found her. But she said she had a few more days. She had been with me for three weeks. Three days later I drove her to that spot. We didn't talk much on the drive. I asked her where she would go and what she would do. She said she did not know but she would manage. I helped her with her bag and kissed her goodbye. She said she loved me. As I drove away I looked back. She was walking into the woods. The next day I went back, I had to know what happened to her. But there was nothing to suggest that she had ever been there, not even a footprint. I walked back into the woods for about a mile but it became too swampy to continue. I never saw her again."

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Last updated: January 4, 2005