On photographer John Miller and an activist’s lens

Hana Pera Aoake & Morgan Godfery

Essay published by The Spinoff, 14 August 2021

John Miller has been a constant and reassuring presence at kaupapa Māori movements for 50 years. By bearing witness to our most pivotal moments, his lens has become one of the most powerful tools for activism in our history, writes Hana Pera Aoake and Morgan Godfery.

When the Ngāpuhi photographer John Miller recalls a memory he’ll often close his eyes. We imagine his memories moving like a camera shutter, recalling in an instant where he was, the person he was talking to, and what they were doing. In a recent show at ObjectSpace with award-winning architect Elisapeta Heta – Pōuwatu: Active Presence – Miller would arrive every morning and take visitors through his photographs and his memories, from naming the chiefs at a Māori Women’s Welfare League hui (Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan in a perfect koru dress) to recalling the talk at a wānanga for the Māori Artists and Writers rōpū.

That daily routine – hosting, storytelling – was a reminder of a point Judith Binney made in her essay, Māori Oral Narratives, Pākehā Written Texts, that oral histories often cohere around photographs. When Binney and her colleague Gillian Chapman took their photographic archives into Tūhoe country, the old people would almost uniformly mihi to the dead, mourning their passing and retelling the stories of their lives. This strikes us as a particularly Māori way to relate to the past that photographs represent, and it’s one way that Miller – perhaps te ao Māori’s finest photographer – relates to his work, telling and retelling the oral histories that accompany his images.

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