Photographer Wayne Miller dies at 94

PanARMENIAN.Net - Photographer Wayne F. Miller, who created a ground-breaking series of portraits chronicling the lives of black Americans in Chicago after serving with an elite Navy unit that produced some of the most indelible combat images of World War II, died Wednesday. He was 94, The Associated Press reports.

Miller was also known for his work as a curator on an international photojournalism exhibition called “The Family of Man” and for contributing the photos to Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “A Baby’s First Year.” He had lived in Orinda for six decades and become ill only in the last weeks of his life, his granddaughter Inga Miller said.

Born in Chicago, Miller trained for a career in banking but became a photographer when famed fashion photographer Edward Steichen picked him to be part of the military unit assigned to document the war. While assigned to the Pacific theater, he took some of the first pictures of the atomic bomb-devastated Hiroshima.

His best-known wartime photograph shows a wounded pilot being pulled from a downed fighter plane. Miller had been scheduled to be aboard the plane before it was shot down, and the photographer who took his place was killed, according to Inga Miller.

After returning home to Chicago, Miller spent two years in the late 1940s on the South Side capturing the experiences of black residents, many of whom had moved north during the war in search of jobs and the promise of civil rights. The originals from his “The Way of the Northern Negro” series are now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

“He was tired of what a good job photography was doing of showing the way we were destroying each other and he decided to come back and have the medium connect people in a more meaningful fashion,” said Paul Berlanga, director of Chicago’s Stephen Daitler Gallery. “He wanted to bring the white and black races together, and thought to make a photo documentary to introduce black Chicago to white Chicago and to white America.”