Born in Chicago in 1918, Wayne Miller began his photographic career shooting part-time while studying banking at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He went on to study photography at the Art Center School of Los Angeles from 1941 to 1942.
From 1942 to 1945 Miller served in the United States Navy where he was assigned to Edward Steichen’s Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. The Navy established this special group in early 1942, shortly after US entry into WW2. Its purpose was to document and publicize aviation activities, and its photographers were given unusual latitude to move around the war zones as they wished. Miller was mostly on aircraft carriers in the Pacific. He also visited Naples, Guam, and Tokyo. He was one of the first American photographers to capture post-war Japan, particularly the destruction of the city of Hiroshima.
After the war Wayne settled back in Chicago and began a project to photograph African Americans in the South Side neighborhood. Miller received two Guggenheim Fellowships in support of this work. At this time he also began a successful freelance career, as well as taught photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago.
In 1949 Wayne and his family moved to Orinda, California. There he worked for LIFE magazine under contract until 1953. The book, Baby’s First Year, showing his daughter’s first year of life was published in 1953. From 1953-1955 Miller worked in New York City as Edward Steichen’s curatorial assistant for the Museum of Modern Art’s photographic exhibition The Family of Man. After returning to California, he spent the next three years making images of children. The resulting book The World Is Young was published in 1958. A long-time member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, Miller was named its chairman in the summer of 1954. He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1958 and served as its president from 1962 to 1966.
Having been active in environmental causes since the 1960’s, Miller then went to work with the National Park Service. In 1970, he joined the Corporation of Public Broadcasting Environmental Center. He retired from professional photography in the mid 1970’s, devoting himself to the management of his redwood forest on the Ten Mile river in Mendocino County, California.
Miller revisited his work in the late 1990’s when a photojournalist friend came by his Orinda home. As they visited in Miller’s print room it became clear to the friend that there was a lot of material there that had not been published and was wonderful. That was the beginning of Miller’s efforts to bring the Chicago South Side images to print. In 2000, over fifty years after they were taken, Wayne’s South Side images were published as Chicago’s South Side 1946-1948, Wayne was 82.
Miller passed away in 2013, he was 93 years old.
Books by Wayne F. Miller
Baby’s First Year (Co-authored by Dr. Benjamin Spock)
The World is Young
Chicago’s South Side 1946-1948
An Eye On the World: oral history interview. Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley. 2003.
Books about Wayne F. Miller
Wayne F. Miller: Photographs 1942-1958, edited by Stephen Daiter
Faces of War: The Untold Story of Edward Steichen’s WWII Photographers, by Mark Faram
Witness In Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, by Ken Light
Collections and Archives
Wayne F. Miller’s work can be licensed through Magnum Photos.
Vintage and contemporary prints are available from the Wayne F. Miller estate. Vintage prints are also available from Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago.
The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson holds Miller’s archives-black and white negatives, contact sheets, correspondence, book dummies, and both fine and working prints.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. has book dummies for Chicago South Side, and many fine prints made in Chicago in 1946-1948.
Miller’s Navy negatives are held in The National Archives at College Park.