Garry Fabian Miller is another artist whose work spans the centuries, looking back to the methods and materials of the first photographic explorations of the 1830s. His way of working has evolved from photograms made with leaves and flower heads, into meditations on the possibilities of light and colour in its purest sense. This approach has anchored his reputation as one of the most forward-thinking photographers of our time. In recent years he has had to come to terms with the gradual extinction of his analogue materials, particularly the Cibachrome chemistry that he prized for its richness and depth of colour, and is now looking forward to a way of making a new colour spectrum through fields of planted colour and vegetable dyes.
His final Cibachrome project was a matrix of 27 prints exploring the possibilities of red, yellow and blue. He has called it the ‘The Ark’ - a repository for the Cibachrome colour palette: “Just as I did all those years ago in my spring photosynthesis pieces, I applied a simple darkroom system, using a measured quantity of light to create an unfolding colour series. In The Ark, as time passes across the paper’s surface, yellow appears first in a dosage of one minute of light, finally in one of 1,200 minutes. The journey begins in deep ochre and ends in the palest, softest yellow. Just as sunlight enriches the colour of the poplar leaf from the flesh pink of the breaking bud to deep dark green, across the thirty days of every May, so my whole Cibachrome world has measured the interaction between a certain quantity of light and an interval of time.” The Ark will also provide guide notes for his first foray into a new colour world, growing ‘Three Acres of Colour’ over a five-year period, an acre of each of the primary colours to make pigment that he describes as “a new version of The Ark, the grid squares now illuminating all the yellows of Weld, the blues of Woad and the reds of Madder.”