In an art world increasingly turning to digital media, traditional techniques nonetheless retain a small and dedicated following. Printmaker Peter Miller, who in 1991 founded the Kamakura Print Collection workshop, is one such traditionalist. "Ink on paper has a certain take on the world," he explains. "Pixels on screen have a vastly different take."
Miller's specialty is photogravure, a technique first developed in England in the 1830s by W.H. Fox Talbot. Charles Baudelaire, writing in a Salon essay of 1859, called photography "the mortal enemy of art." But photogravure, Miller explains, marries the best of both techniques: "The medium has the spontaneity of photography and the ink-on-paper depth of an etching. Tones, rather than lines, create the image."
Now Miller, a resident of Japan since 1981, has joined his photogravure artwork to another artform, the haiku, in an exhibition running May 2-6 at Gallery Yu in Kamakura.