| | Published July 4th, 2012
| Finding Hope for the Future by Remembering Our Past The photography of Wayne F. Miller
| | Laurie Snyder |  | | Crewmen lifting Kenneth Bratton (AOM) out of turret of TBF on the USS Saratoga (CVA-3) after raid on Rabaul.
Photographer: Wayne F. Miller. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.
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A newly-delivered child held firmly in one hand by an obstetrician, his slick body still tethered to his mother by an uncut umbilical cord. The faces of a nation, grief-stricken and stunned, by the passing of a president. Baby-faced pilots headed for planes aboard their World War II aircraft carriers. The resilience of the human spirit.
His photographs are the ones many of us grew up with in Life magazine. They have been described as "an artist's struggle with darkness while trying to find, both literally and figuratively, the light," and are the work of legendary photojournalist and long-time Orinda resident, Wayne F. Miller.
Fred Ritchin, the author of the above quote about Miller and Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, also describes Miller's work as "a powerful record of American hopes and tragedies during the middle of the last century."
Our parents and grandparents were the first to be mesmerized by Miller's vision, his work distributed in newspapers across the country as wire photos placed next to the headlines of the day about fire-ravaged Nazi cities and weather-delayed, Allied bombing runs.
Sitting with Miller and his wife, Joan, in the comforting warmth of an Orinda June afternoon, sheltered by redwood trees, it is impossible to believe that they are both now in their 90s. They are mature, but they are definitely not old. His wife complements his storytelling by pulling out copies of his published books, other works written about him, and binders filled with prints made from his negatives, many of which are housed in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, DC.
"That was an important day for me. This is the back of a torpedo bomber - the gunner," explains Miller as he points to a now famous photo of one man pulling another from a bomber on board the deck of the USS Saratoga.
"I was getting ready to go fly on the same airplane, and I was getting my equipment into shape." He was interrupted by a knock on the door by Photographer First Class Paul Barnett.
"'Mr. Miller,' he said, 'I just received my orders to be transferred.... I've been the photographer for this squadron for many years, but have never flown on a mission with it, and I understand that you're going on this mission tomorrow, probably taking the only space on that plane that will be available. I hope you won't pull rank on me, but I'd like to go with them.'"
Miller had been readying himself, he says, for the November 1943 raid on Rabaul. "North Borneo was really a dangerous place then because it was well defended.... Our fighter squadron from the Saratoga was to go in there and break up this gathering [of Japanese forces]. And so this photographer, who I'd never met before, he hoped that he could go and take my place. So, I had no choice except to say, 'Okay. You go and I'll get the next one.'"
Barnett was killed that day. Miller points to where he would have been sitting, had fate and Barnett not intervened. "He was taking my place. So, this particular picture has extra meaning to me."
There were other close calls as well. "I remember this one time we were under attack by kamikaze.... I turned my back and this plane just missed the carrier and landed over there in the water [pointing]. And out of the water came - like a Fourth of July thing - this guy was ejected from his seat, like a flower. He came down in the water.... had his ceremonial garments on. And it was just by luck that he missed.... But it happened so fast.... All of a sudden, there he was."
During World War II, Miller was part of the distinguished special photographic unit headed by Edward Steichen. "A photographer in the Navy is under the direction of all the hierarchy above him. So, when this unit was formed, [Steichen] insisted that we all be officers. As a result, we had freedom to move about. I traveled continuously during the war - from one ship to another - and one landing to another - one operation to another.
"I used it [the Saratoga] as a base, really, for my operations. And I could move at my discretion. My orders were such that I could proceed wherever I deemed necessary, and make photographs, and return." He left to do a story on the children of Naples, Italy - and again to do one on PT boats.
His images beg viewers to engage not just their minds, but their compassion. At times, says Miller, he is "caught up in the emotions of the moment. So much so, that it's difficult to make photographs because my best photographs come from trying to look through the eyes of my subjects. And when they're suffering, I seem to share that.... In some cases you're sharing some of the shock of the moment, and the pains of the moment."
He witnessed MacArthur's return to the Philippines, pondered the devastated landscape of Hiroshima, and helped America mourn the loss of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"I walked with the casket, all the way from the train station to the White House with my back to the casket, and I photographed the spectators.... It was amazing to me," he says, "the spectrum ... the slice of America."
Photos so clear that it almost seems possible to step through each frame to stand in solidarity with the men, women, and children who put their differences aside to bring the world out of darkness and back into the light.
"What is past is prologue, and that's very important to me," says Miller. "Whatever has happened in the past is going to come around again."
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 | | The funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hyde Park, New York, April 15, 1945.
Photographer: Wayne F. Miller. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.
|  | | Wayne F. Miller, walking backward while accompanying President Franklin D. Roosevelt's casket from the train station to the White House, captured the face of America - united and grieving - along the funeral procession's route on April 14, 1945. Photographer: Wayne F. Miller. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA