Picture This

Early interest in photography

I am a retired language educator who developed an interest in photography soon after graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN with a degree in French. My first serious SLR camera was an Olympus OM 1, at the time a revolutionary lightweight device that I purchased for a trip to France in 1978. I felt like I had dropped a small fortune, but when I got back I loved using the dark rooms at Film in the Cities in St. Paul to print and manipulate black and white images of the Paris that I loved to explore. 

Using photography in my work

It didn’t take me long to start offering my camera skills to the refugee resettlement agency I was working for - providing images for a newsletter that chronicled the efforts of the agency to help new arrivals find jobs, housing, and clothing. After spending  several months interviewing families in refugee camps, I used photographs taken in northern Thailand to create slideshows that complemented volunteer training back in Minnesota. 

When my children were born, I unwittingly took a creative hiatus of sorts to spend time taking family snapshots and recording family travels and gatherings. Later I ran a travel planning business and once again used my own body of images taken in France to market my services via classes and a self-published newsletter. Even as I pivoted back to language education as the editor of a national newsletter for language teachers, I continued to use my own skills to add photographic content to the newsletter I was editing. 

Photography as art

Now, as a convert to digital and iPhone photography I focus on architecture, wildlife, landscape, and abstract subjects. Although I was initially loath to manipulate images with Photoshop or the plethora of phone apps that have become available, I am finding some that I do enjoy working with - Distressed FX, Slow Shutter, and Prisma, to name a few, and am learning to use Mobile Lightroom on my phone to take pictures directly through the camera on the app. Since switching to digital photography about 12 years ago, I have had images exhibited at the Minneapolis Photo Center, the Cape Cod Art Center, the New York Center for Photographic Art, the Black Box Gallery (Portland, OR), and the Pennsylvania Center for Photography, among other venues, and will continue to look for opportunities to show my work.

If you know of galleries or other venues where my work would be welcome, please contact me kimerlymiller@gmail.com.