Remembering Peter Miller, Who Photographed Vermont’s ‘Simple People Living Simple Lives' 

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• Peter Miller

Peter Miller eased his computer chair across his cramped Stowe apartment one day last month, paying little mind to the tube that tethered him to a sighing oxygen machine in the corner. A shake of his mouse revealed a computer desktop overwhelmed by files and folders, the digital footprint of a wide-ranging career. Candids from the streets of Paris; panoramas from the Great Plains; portraits of long-gone Vermonters. He clicked a random file, and a leafless tree filled the screen. He tilted his head and frowned. When he spoke, age slurred his words.

"Nice picture," he said, "but it might not have the spark people want."

Miller, Vermont's iconic documentarian, was tackling perhaps his most ambitious project yet: cataloging his 70 years of photographs in hopes of selling the archive to a museum or library, some place that would preserve it for future generations.

It was slow work, made slower by the fact that the chaotic scene on his computer represented only a fraction of his collection; many more photos were stashed in boxes at his Waterbury studio, some still in negative form. He had long spoken of hiring an assistant but never got around to it, and so here he was, focusing his waning energy on a task he knew he might never complete.

I had come to interview Miller in March for a planned cover story in Seven Days. I had never met him and knew little of his work beyond the handsome coffee table books I'd glimpsed at stores across Vermont, including his most recent, Vanishing Vermonters: Loss of a Rural Culture.

It was clear upon meeting Miller that he would not be spending what time he had left poolside or playing cards. Nearing the end of his ninth decade, he had too many plans, too many ambitions. Too much still left to prove, particularly to the many publishers who scorned his first book, Vermont People, more than three decades ago, thrusting him down a path of self-sufficiency.

Neither of us knew then how quickly the clock would run out. After months of declining health, he caught pneumonia in early April and was admitted to the hospital, where he died last week at the age of 89.

Ownership of Miller's archive now rests with a trust run by two of his longtime friends: Rob Hunter, the former executive director of the Frog Hollow Vermont Craft Gallery; and Ed French, a Stowe attorney. Hunter has spent the last week calling Vermont institutions in search of one willing to take on his friend's expansive collection, aiming to ensure Miller's work remains available to the public. Several places have already expressed interest, Hunter said, though he declined to provide names.

"Vermont underwent a giant turning point through the course of Peter's life," Hunter said, referring to the state's transformation in the last half of the 20th century, from a relatively isolated place dotted with small dairy farms to an increasingly suburban landscape crisscrossed by highways. "Peter had insight into something that most of us will never see again."

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• Will and Rowena

Born in New York City in 1934, Miller moved to Vermont at 13 and quickly fell in love with his new home, the rolling hills and farm lands offering endless opportunity for exploration. "My father and mother would fight; I'd be in the woods making friends with the animals, or just walking around," he told me.

Miller bought his first camera using $160 that he received from an insurance company after someone stole some guns of his.

As a student at the University of Toronto, he met the famous portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh and traveled to Europe as his assistant, helping out on photo shoots of notable figures including Pablo Picasso, Albert Camus and John Steinbeck. Miller enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating from the Canadian college and spent two years working as a Signal Corps photographer in Paris, roaming the streets with his camera. He then wrote for Life magazine in the late 1950s before returning to Vermont and settling in Stowe. (Miller, who had two daughters, later moved to Waterbury after he and his wife divorced; he never remarried).

For the next three decades, Miller befriended and photographed Vermonters who represented a disappearing way of life: hill farmers, country store owners, deer and woodchuck hunters, sugar makers, lumberjacks, auctioneers, barbers, fiddlers, coopers. "Simple people living simple lives," he would later say.

In the late 1980s, Miller sought to compile Vermont images into a book that would tell the story of a changing culture. He pitched it to roughly a dozen publishers and struck out with each.

Undeterred, he refinanced his Waterbury home and used the money to self-publish Vermont People, an acclaimed book that sold more than 15,000 copies. He went on to self-publish six other books, the most recent one in 2017.

One of his best-known images is a 1959 portrait of Will and Rowena Austin, a retired farm couple from Weston, photographed in the falling snow outside their barns, their stoic faces evoking the hard life of farming. A later portrait, from 1997, captures Fred Tuttle, a Tunbridge dairy farmer who gained local fame when, in a publicity stunt for a movie, he ran against a newcomer seeking one of the state's U.S. Senate seats. Tuttle, too, is seen hunched in his farmyard, holding a portrait of his father holding a portrait of his father (a photo Miller also took), encapsulating in a single image Vermont's rural past.

An avid outdoorsman, Miller had an affinity for landscape photography, too, and could often be found chasing sunsets across the countryside. "It isn't photography that I like so much," he told me. "What I do like is beauty."

But he often found beauty where others would see only bleakness, as in an undated photograph of a Fairfax cornfield in late March, snow melting into mud under threatening clouds. A second mud-season photograph captures a bygone world: a distant view of a sugar maker driving a pair of horses and a sledge across a dark, snow-striped field.

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• Fred Tuttle

Such photos won him local acclaim and the patronage of Stowe-bound tourists who passed his studio on Route 100 in Waterbury. In 2006, the Burlington Free Press named Miller its Vermonter of the Year. In 2013, former senator Patrick Leahy read a tribute to him on the floor of the U.S. Senate. "His resiliency is remarkable and his uncanny ability to display the beauty of Vermont in a way words cannot do justice serves as an inspiration for photographers everywhere," Leahy said in his speech.

A self-described curmudgeon, Miller could indeed come off as unfriendly to new acquaintances. The first time he met Hunter, for instance, he introduced himself only with a question: "'So you gonna buy my books or what?'" Hunter recalled with a laugh. But Miller's gruff exterior would quickly give way to a warmth and kindness that friends say stemmed from his deep curiosity about people and their stories.

"All those people he photographed, a lot of them were long-term investments that he would make: going out, talking to them, getting to know who they are," said Hunter, a documentary filmmaker. "That, I think, made for a better end product."

Self-publishing allowed Miller to produce his books with meticulous care, which is perhaps why the quality of his volumes rivals those put out by large publishers. But the do-it-yourself approach had its downsides — primarily, financial. For all his success in Vermont, Miller's work never garnered much attention beyond state lines. And though his writing and photography sales once brought in up to $85,000 annually, his income had plummeted over the last decade, making it harder for him to get by.

In 2015, he started renting out several rooms in his Waterbury house through Airbnb, a short-lived venture that helped sustain him for a while but also seemed to deepen his frustration with his changing home state.

"I am tired of being a chamber maid for my Airbnb clients and spending whatever I make for taxes, heating, electricity and vacations for bureaucrats," he wrote in a 2016 blog post titled, "All I Want to do is Write and Take Photographs."

Finally, with the encouragement of his two daughters, Miller sold his home late last year and moved into a Stowe apartment building for seniors.

He struggled with the transition. The tiny apartment, which he referred to as his "prison cell," could not accommodate all of his prints and photography gear. And though the buyer of his house allowed him to maintain a workshop space, his worsening health made the 15-minute drive prohibitive. "My mind is a lot younger, and that's a problem," he told me.

Miller became depressed during this time. Worried that he might never recover if he didn't occupy his mind, he took up an unexpected hobby: ice cream making. It proved to be a great healing device, he said, bringing back memories of childhood, "churning the bucket and licking the spoon."

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• A blacksmith's hands

Miller had been in his new apartment for a couple of months by the time I met him in early March for the first of our two interviews. He seemed in good spirits and immediately launched into his life story. Expecting we'd have more chances to drill down on specifics later, I let him talk for two hours virtually uninterrupted: about his childhood in Vermont, his days in Paris, his trips across the Great Plains.

Eventually, though, his thoughts turned to the future. He said the University of Vermont offered him $100,000 for his archive years ago — a figure he dismissed at the time as insulting for a lifetime of work. But he now seemed to be thinking more about his place in history.

"What's going to happen to my photography when I'm gone?" he wondered aloud. "Right now, maybe they go to the dump. That's not good. These pictures should be around 50, 100 years from now."

Before I left after our first visit, Miller asked for a favor. He wanted to hang one of his own photos over his bed but couldn't manage to do it. He pointed to a hammer and nail he had set out on a table. "Can you?" he asked.

"Sure, Peter," I said, picking up the frame. The color print was unlike any of his other work I'd seen. In it, a full moon cast light onto a quiet Montana riverbed, with a 20-inch trout hovering impossibly over the water. Miller explained that he created the image with the help of a friend at Life magazine many years ago, using a complicated darkroom technique that involved melding three different photos into one.

Miller had taken thousands of images in the years since, and many were objectively better than this one, which felt like a scene ripped from a fisherman's acid trip. Still, there was an odd beauty to the photo, and I could tell that it meant something special to him.

After I hung the photo, I rejoined him at the foot of his bed. The frame was clearly off-center — a bit too far to the left and the sharp-eyed photographer no doubt noticed the imperfection. But when I offered to try again, he shook his head.

"It's perfect," he said.