Static Live Magazine February 2019

Wayne Miller Tribute
By © Hank Harrison
On May 22, 2013, at the age of 94, Wayne Miller, one
of the greatest photographers in American history,
passed away at his home in Orinda California. For
decades, Miller photographed the human condition,
mostly in black and white. He also loved jazz, blues,
and rock and roll especially when all three idioms
came together.
This guy was so far ahead of his time it was ridiculous.
He came to interview me for an hour one day
in 1967 for the LSD rescue project, and we became
close friends; we even went on assignments together.
If I know anything about photography it came
from Wayne Miller, who learned a lot from his guru
Edward Steichen, so how lucky can one idiot be?
I miss Wayne, but at least he left behind an entire
library of unbelievable pics. The most famous of
which was the first pictures ever taken of live birth,
pictures now common, but unprecedented in the
early 1960s.
The first thing I learned from Wayne was to avoid
looking like a “Camera Nazi,” he didn’t even have
a camera, at least not one visible to the naked
eye. When I asked him, “Where’s your camera?” he
reached into the pocket of his military field jacket
and pulled out a 50mm Pentax with no lens cap,
brandished it, and said, “right here.” Later we talked
about that, and Wayne told me, “Good pictures are
taken by the human eye, no camera can improve on
a bad eye, but a good eye can take good pictures
with a bad camera.”
Miller was one of a handful of photographers selected
to be a part of Edward Steichen’s elite naval
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