John Miller
Logbook
John Miller
The Middle of the Day
I began my photo series, The Middle of the Day, in 1994. Since then, as photography's technical and social conditions have changed, my project has changed as well. What's remained consistent is the rule of only shooting photographs between 12:00 – 2:00 pm and the project's diaristic and flaneur-like implications. On any given day, I more or less photograph my immediate surroundings.
After the COVID pandemic hit New York in mid-March, like many others, I started taking long walks as part of a new daily routine. What began as simple wandering congealed into two routes: one through the Lower East Side's housing projects and the other through the Financial District. Even though I have lived in New York for over forty years, through these excursions, I discovered corners of the city – all close at hand – that I had never seen before.
Offsetting this sense of discovery was the rapid exhaustibility of certain images: masked faces, empty streets, boarded-up stores. All of these are significant, even historical. Yet, the inevitable, daily repetition – the bombardment, even – of the conditions that they represent often rendered them redundant, if not mind-numbing. It seems that they became clichés too quickly. One day they were poignant, the next annoying.
One of my goals in The Middle of the Day is to call viewers' attention to things otherwise overlooked because they are so familiar. Perhaps a crisis is something capable of inverting values such as these. It can sideline the normative, while making the desire for diversion unseemly.
John Miller
