ZMiller

GLASSLANDS PHOTGRAPHS OF BLOWN GLASS
I first became fascinated with photography as a child because of my grandfather, who
was an amateur photographer. He spent many hours with my older brother and me in the
dark room. My interest in early glass began as a teenager in the late 1970s when I
discovered an exposed nineteenth-century garbage dump in a construction site in New
York City. The site was filled with a great variety of blown glass bottles, some of which I
carried away. That event sparked a life long passion for digging up and preserving
pieces of the past, and for antique bottles in particular. Beyond the historical association,
there is something intriguing to me in the textures and colors of the glass used to make
these old bottles.

Some of the bottles I unearthed have developed a multicolored patina, or oxidation, from
years of burial and contact with moisture. The variety of colors, textures, and patterns are
beautiful in normal view, but they take on an otherworldly quality when seen in the
GLASSLANDS collection. While concentrating on these psychedelic images, I wished
that so many of my interesting, but non-colored bottles could be enlivened with an array
of colors like the ones that came out of the ground. This desire to add color to the glass
inspired me to focus on a clear bottle which I held up in front of a group of coloredbottles
in a sunlit window. Instantly, the clear glass was infused with a combination of colors from
behind. By rearranging the bottles on the backlit shelf, an extraordinary variety of colors
were created.

I use a number of close up lenses to move around and within the glass, allowing me an
opportunity to capture otherwise unseen and unknown views on film. I work with natural
reflected sunlight only, and by sometimes mixing that light with additional colored glass
bottles I create these images. It feels like painting with glass and light while using film as
the canvas.

GLASSLANDS photographs are offered as custom prints mounted in unique antique
frames and as giclees (printed on canvas) in limited editions.