About Peter Miller, Author and Photographer

"I come from Vermont, I do what I want." is an old Vermont adage and says much about the independence and feistiness of the Vermonter. Peter Miller, the Vermont author and photographer, has those traits. He writes and photographs, and only what he wants. He does not compromise and he has not sold out his talents. Women he has loved have left him when they find they play second fiddle to his creativity. He is also a bad risk, for he has no pension, no money invested in stocks, no savings account. And he really doesn't care.  

Miller, however, is not a native Vermonter. He is a flatlander, born in New York City in 1934, raised for the first 13 years of his life in New Jersey and Connecticut. His mother brought him, his brother and sister, to Weston, Vermont in 1947. She was divorced, and, at that time, Vermont was terribly inexpensive. They were financial refugees.  

Miller took to Vermont, to hunting, fishing and skiing. He went to Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester and his favorite pastimes were sports and double dating. In his sophomore year his guns were stolen from his home in Weston, Vermont and his mother gave him an insurance check for $160. With it he bought a Kodak twin lens reflex camera. He does not know why; family members only took snapshots. There were no creative people in his background, just farmers, businessmen and one lawyer. He began photographing his schoolmates. There were no photography teachers at that time so he taught himself and made his own contact printer. 

He also began photographing his neighbor-farmers in Weston. One was Will Austin, who, five years later, he again photographed, with his wife, as they stood in front of their barn on a snowy day in February. Thirty-one years later it would become the cover of his book Vermont People.  

The young Vermonter attended the University of Toronto, at that time it was the source of a very inexpensive college education. There he joined the Hart House camera club and, for the first time, met and learned from other photographers. When he was a junior he was selected by Yousuf Karsh, the famous portrait photographer, to assist him in Europe while he photographed such people as Picasso, Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Albert Camus, Pope John, Lord Mountbatten, Field Marshall Montgomery and other luminaries.  

He returned to University and his photos and memories of the trip were printed in a Canadian magazine. At the same time he freelanced his first photo and text article, a story on the Benedictine monks of the Weston Priory, who were brought to Vermont by his mother. It appeared in Jubilee Magazine.  

In 1955 Miller was inducted into the US Army. He graduated first in his class from the Ft. Monmouth Signal Corps photography school and was assigned to Paris as a photographer. For the next two and a half years he worked within the city of Paris and learned to live as a European. He studied the Impressionists at the Jeu de Palme, ate in one-star restaurants, learned what a good wine was and walked the streets of Paris, looking, watching and photographing. He was learning to see as a photographer sees. Over 40 years later the pictures he took, and the memories he retained, were the basis for his book The First Time I Saw Paris.  

When Miller left Paris in 1958, just as deGaulle came to power, he decided to give up photography. He knew he needed to learn how to write. Within a year he was working for LIFE as a reporter and in the next four years, he says, learned enough about reporting, writing, layout and photography as a journalism tool to give him a solid foundation for all his future work.  

Six months later he resigned and moved back to Vermont with his wife, who he first met in Paris, and two young daughters. He started a magazine called Vermont Skiing which he wrote, photographed, edited and sold ads. It was recognized as one of the best ski magazines of its time but it was too small a region and died in the recession of 1967. He was divorced at the same time and went down the road with nothing but his fishing and hunting gear, his Brittany spaniel Parker, and his cameras. 

Miller began to freelance articles. Shortly he was a contributing writer and photographer for SKI Magazine and worked there for 20 years, creating profiles of ski racers, photographing ski resorts, and writing his first book, The 30,000 Mile Ski Race, a story about the 1971 American ski team on the World Cup circuit in Europe. Miller claims to have skied at 107 resorts in four continents.   

He left SKI when, as he says, bean counters replaced editors and publishers and his copy was either being edited into political correctness, or brand names of advertisers inserted into his stories. In 1980 he left Vermont for New York City and reshaped his career as a stock photographer for The Image Bank. In 1985, after six months in Chamonix, France, he moved back to Vermont to escape the yuppification of New York. His income grew yet he grew uncomfortable with his work. An editor at The Image Bank, Jean Yves Mallet, once berated him for laziness and for not taking responsibility for his talent.  

Miller thought of that for a couple of years and then began to do what he knows best, write and photograph. He did books no publisher would touch so he self-published Vermont People in 1990. In 1993 he started his Plains journey, which culminated in 1996 with People of the Great Plains, which won four national awards. In 1999 he wrote The First Time I Saw Paris. In 2002 he completed Vermont Farm Women, the sister volume to Vermont People. In 2005 he wrote and photographed Vermont Gathering Places, a book supported by the Preservation Trust of Vermont. The book shows the importance of small town centers for the interaction of Vermont residents. Vermont Gathering Places is the last of the Vermont trilogy. All three books extol and explain, sometimes subtly and other times bluntly, what makes Vermont so special. In Peter's eyes, it is the people and the rural culture that has given this state a sense of openess and freedom. For his trilogy of books on the Vermont culture Peter was named 2006 Vermonter of the Year by the Burlington Free Press and the Vermont State Legislature.  

Peter is editing a small book of essays he has written from his home in Colbyville. It is called Nothing Whatever Happens in Colbyville, Vermont (Where's That???). He is also outlining a small book called The Vermont Way, lessons he has learned from Vermonters. "I feel there is a lack," Peter said, "in the 21st century, of the qualities that made this country great: honesty, integrity, common sense, simplicity, frugality and responsibility to your neighbors, your community and the land.

"I have learned," he said, "that it sure is fun to travel, but the best material for photographs and for writing can be found in the region in which you live."

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