Lot 43: Tulip Tree Leaves, 1999

GARRY FABIAN MILLER (B. 1957)
Tulip Tree Leaves, 1999
3 unique dye-bleach photograms
each signed, titled and dated in pencil (on the verso)
each 11¼ x 7 7/8in. (28.6 x 20cm.) (3)

Hamiltons Gallery, London

Conceived and presented as sequences, these leaf studies offer an exquisite and moving elegy on the passage of light, of time...and of life itself.


When Garry Fabian Miller decided to create serial images of leaves he combined the best of current technology with the most fundamental of processes that dates back to the 1830s. These are images made without a camera by placing the leaves between the light source and the light-sensitive paper -- in this case Cibachrome paper that rendered a direct positive image with high saturation of colour. Miller is essentially adapting the process of Photogenic Drawing that was the first successful step made by William Henry Fox Talbot in his progressive invention and refinement of photography.