By Amy Campion
Nathan ‘Natti’ Miller did not begin photography as a young art school graduate with a carefully mapped career ahead. He came to it later in life, led by curiosity, travel and a sense that the world was full of moments most people passed without noticing.
Now based in Rye, Nathan has built a body of work reaching from Havana to the Mississippi Delta, Paris, Tbilisi and Jaffa. His photographs are often described as humanistic, and it is easy to see why. He is drawn to faces, streets, rituals, music, faith, and the small gestures that reveal something larger about a place.
“I look at things that everyone looks at,” he said, “but I see them through my own perspective.”
That way of seeing has taken him to remarkable places. In Cuba, where his first solo exhibition grew from 11 days documenting Havana, Nathan met Alberto Korda, the photographer behind Guerrillero Heroico, the famous image of Che Guevara. Nathan photographed Korda in front of his own iconic image, a portrait in conversation with history.
In the US, Nathan has travelled repeatedly to the Mississippi Delta, where the blues was born. Over several years he photographed musicians and the region’s enduring cultural landscape. The work was exhibited at Monash Gallery of Art and later at the Delta Blues Museum in Mississippi, and it became the hardcover book Notes from the Mississippi Delta.
Music appears elsewhere in Nathan’s work too, with photographs of artists including James Brown and Bob Geldof, although his interest is rarely celebrity for its own sake. He is more interested in what a picture reveals and the story it tells.
His project Somewhere in Jaffa brought that sensibility to one of the world’s oldest port cities. Photographing in black and white, Nathan captured the daily rhythms of a place shaped by Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities, through markets, doorways, windows, streets and conversation. The photographs became both an exhibition and a book, published by M.33.
Nathan has also taken part in Magnum Photos workshops in Paris, including one led by the late Abbas Attar, known for his work on the Iranian Revolution. Another body of work, Life devotion and death in Tbilisi, took him to Georgia, where his mother was born, to photograph Orthodox Easter and the rituals of faith, family and place.
Many of Nathan’s earlier photographs were shot on analogue film, and some remain unpublished, fitting for an artist less driven by speed than attention. His photographs ask us to slow down and look again, not at the staged or spectacular, but at human details hiding in plain sight.
For local audiences, there may soon be a chance to do exactly that. Nathan is listed with Peninsula Studio Trail and plans to take part in upcoming open studio events, offering visitors a chance to see his work closer to home.
From Rye to Jaffa, Havana to the Delta, his photography reminds us that stories are everywhere, and that the art is often in noticing what was there all along.
