Miller and Mosher: A profound Collaboration

Granite & Cedar, The People and the Land of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.  Photographs by John M. Miller with short fiction by Howard Frank Mosher. Published by Thistle Hill Publications, Vermont Folklife Center; 107 pages, $35 in hard cover. 

 reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

The Northeast Kingdom’s finest photographer and its best novelist have combined their talents in an unusual way.  Granite and Cedar combines the black and white photographs of John Miller of Coventry with a short story by Howard Mosher of Irasburg.

The result is remarkable.  At first “reading,” Mr. Miller’s richly textured photos draw one quickly through the book.  There are landscapes, architectural studies of buildings and bits of buildings, and portraits of the people who occupy them.

The quality of the images is about as good as it could be.  The book is printed by Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, whose craftsmen are among the best who apply ink to paper, anywhere.

Mr. Miller’s range of human subjects is broad, from some of the Kingdom’s poorest residents to its richest.  His ability to capture character rather than circumstance makes it all but impossible to tell the difference.

And the book provides no help at all.  The text of such collections is typically documentary — who the subjects are, where they live, what they do, and perhaps what they have to say about themselves. 

On all those questions, this book is silent.  In a brief acknowledgement at the end Mr. Miller does name — and thank — many of his subjects.  But the reader is left to match the names with the faces.

Those who have kicked around the Kingdom for a while will recognize many of them.  Most of these photos were taken between 1971 and 1976, and some of their subjects are no longer with us. 

Woven through these 67 photographs is Second Sight, a short story by Howard Mosher.  Told by 15-year-old Rob Hubbell, it is an account of the arrival of the interstate highway which will slice through the home farm on Kingdom Mountain, and how Rob’s great-aunt, matriarch of the family, chooses to respond.

The unusual combination was suggested by Mr. Mosher when Mr. Miller and his publisher, the Vermont Folklife Center, asked him to write a forward for a book of Mr. Miller’s photographs.

“It occured to me that a story I was thinking about writing might fit in better with the pictures,” Mr. Mosher said this week.  “I thought the pictures were just stunning.  I couldn’t imagine anybody bothering to read an introduction to a book of photographs that good.”

Because his story was an idea, rather than a manuscript, Mr. Mosher was able to shape it around some of Mr. Miller’s images. 

A big safety pin that replaces the broken zipper on logger Henry Vincent’s jacket becomes the “everyday brooch” on Aunt Jane’s wool hunting jacket when she heads up the mountain for a day of hard, physical work. 

A tamarack Mr. Miller captured in late fall becomes the pale gold tamarack from which a great horned owl descends on a snowshoe hare.

An elderly couple’s parlor, decorated with antlers and dominated by a towering parlor stove, finds its way into Aunt Jane’s house on Kingdom Mountain.

These references are too subtle and too infrequent to turn the book into an illustrated short story, which it emphatically is not.

Instead, Mr. Mosher’s fictional text serves to highlight the nature of Mr. Miller’s photography. 

We all understand how fiction writers work with the raw materials they find around them.  They transform it creatively.  Put less pretentiously, they make stuff up.

Unless they indulge themselves in darkroom-created abstracts, photographers seem bound to the reality that their lenses capture. 

Yet what Mr. Miller does with this book is present an essay about the nature of a place he loves, rather than a documentary about the particular people who inhabit it. 

Brief discussions of Mr. Miller’s approach hang on the walls at the folklife center’s headquarters in Middlebury, where these pictures and others that aren’t in the book are hanging in a traveling exhibit.

Mr. Miller said he prowled through the Kingdom endlessly in the 1970s, looking hard, photographing rarely.  He continues:

“When I finally did make those photographs, or that photograph, it wasn’t just a photograph of a particular thing...it was a symbolic image.”

Mr. Mosher has filled a wonderful series of regional novels with characters he has found, befriended, profoundly enjoyed, and transformed into something quite like symbolic images. Some of them can be found in this book’s short story.

And interleaved with them are Mr. Miller’s images, perfectly concrete and profoundly symbolic.

The show at the Vermont Folklife Center opened on Friday and continues through November 10.  Middlebury’s a long way to drive to get a look at the Kingdom.  But the view is well worth it.