The Lakota man called him Shadow Chaser, afraid the camera would steal his soul. Peter Miller then asked him if could take a picture of his shadow. No. But, Miller could take a picture of Young Man Afraid of His Horses’s dance costume. That would be all right.

Young Man’s story is just one of 55 stories and 133 duotone prints in Miller’s latest book, People of the Great Plains. Starting in Montana and working his way south, Miller interviewed, visited, photographed and lived among the people of the Great Plains. At times, he felt desiccated from summer’s dry heat; during the winter he almost froze to death. Some of the people in the book are elderly, the remnants of a vanishing culture. Since Miller’s visit six have died. All were pleased to be a part of a picture book of the Plains. There are stories about Indians, cowboys, schoolchildren, teachers, farmers, ranchers, an all-female threshing crew, a golf ranger presiding over a sand-and-buffalo-grass golf course, a Mexican mechanic and countless others.

What drives a man to spend months traveling in, to him, unknown territory? Mere curiosity? For Miller it is that and more. The Plains to the majority of Americans is “fly-over” country. It has to be crossed to get from the east coast to the west coast. It is vast, dry and full of wheat. It is also full of hard-working, tough, honest Americans. It is their story Miller set out to write and photograph. And he did. Maybe, too, he could find out a bit more about himself. He did that too.

On June 22, 1993, Miller left his home in Waterbury with his 18-foot long Airstream camper hooked up behind his Jeep. The camper was his home for three months on the first trip out. Four trips, seven months, 400 pages of typewritten notes, 400 rolls of film, and 30,000 miles later, Miller had the makings of his book.

Miller himself is a tough, acerbic, witty, practical and persistent. He has to be persistent. Over 20 publishers turned down the opportunity to publish the Plains book. Just as they did his Vermont People . To prove them wrong, Miller has sold over 10,000 copies of Vermont People , the book the publishing industry said would never sell. That is an excellent record for a regional “picture” book. Having done so as a self-published regional picture book is phenomenal. Which attests to the quality of Miller’s work.

Because of his persistence and his talent, The Image Bank, a company selling photographs for use in advertising and in magazines, awarded him their grant, The Image Bank Award for Visual Excellence to publish People of the Great Plains . The Countryside Institute of Cold Spring, New York awarded Miller a grant providing him with enough money for the first trip. The Countryside Institute is an environmental group interested in how the environment and the people living in it interact. Without these grants, Miller would be still dreaming.

His black and white images capture the soul and spirit of a time and place. A careful photographer who studied under the world-famous portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh in Canada, he has also worked for LIFE Magazine as a photographer and then journalist (scooping the nation on the Thresher submarine disaster which was suppressed by the magazine). Later, he worked at Ski Magazine as one of the editors, until he had an editorial disagreement with the rest of the staff. Stock photography was the answer—for then. He has thousands of slides with The Image Bank. The royalties from these photos have kept him fed and functional during his quest to investigate and photograph the Great Plains.

For Vermont People , Miller set up his own publishing company, Vermont People Project. Since that didn’t cover a Plains book, he changed the company to Silver Print Press. With his daughter, Hilary, as editor and Peter Holm as book designer, Silver Print Press is capable of handing other’s books as well as Miller’s future projects. His next planned publication is a collection of pictures taken in France during the 1950s. Miller had taken the images while stationed in Paris as a Signal Corps photographer and forgotten about them, only to rediscover the negatives recently. They had never been printed.

Although he decries the trend toward computerized images—Miller is right up there with technology having typeset his book, his ads, and scanned his pictures. He is currently working on a web page and playing with all the other advanced cybernaut tools.

Along with his Vermont People , Miller has created another classic capturing a way of life and pieces of history that are slowly eroding in America. Perhaps the name Shadow Chaser isn’t so far off after all.

© 1996 Kitty Werner