Richard C. Miller, 1990.
Photo by Michael Andrews
Richard Crump Miller was born on Aug 6, 1912, in Hanford, CA, to Ray Oakley Miller and Laura Belle Crump Miller. When he was five the family went to live in Bayonne NJ.
Dick's father had come to California for his health, and he took the family back East to pursue his career as a minister. He did not like New Jersey and brought the family back to California, at first to Fresno, where he had a small parish for a year. Then he was offered the St. James Church. It was a small parish, but in time he built it up into a large one. Ray bought a property for it on Wilshire for $10,000 when the church refused to spend the money.
One year later it was worth $30,000; Ray sold it to the church for the original $10,000.
Both Dick and his brother, Randolph, had private tutors for the first three years of their education. Then they went to the Harvard Military Academy at Pico and Western.
When the school moved to the San Fernando Valley, Dick attended the Episcopal Church School, where he went from the 6th to the 10th grade. Then one morning he read in the newspaper that LA High School was opening that week. At breakfast that morning he said to his father, "Do I have to go back to the Episcopal school? Can I go to LA High?"
His father agreed, and Dick transferred to the public school.
Dick's father had a 3¼x4¼ folding roll-film camera, which sparked Dick's interest in photography.
In 1929 Dick was introduced to Leica and Graflex cameras. He also studied cinematography while attending, successively, Stanford University and Pomona College.
The first year at Stanford, Dick won the welterweight boxing championship. Although he was only a sophomore, no one would fight him, and he retained his title unopposed.
After Dick went to Stanford and then Pomona for a year, he did his final year at USC. There he met Margaret, his future wife of seventy years. "Luckiest thing I ever did," he says.
Dick appeared in a stage play in 1935 at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. There he shot photographs of fellow players with a borrowed Leica. He acquired a Zeiss Contax I 35mm camera and began to take photographs by available light. While traveling to New York looking for work as an actor, Dick showed his photographs to Edward Steichen. Encouraged by Steichen's reaction, he continued to photograph actors. But Dick returned suddenly to Los Angeles.
"I came back because Margaret wasn't going to wait. She was seeing some other guy. So I came straight back to Calif. I still remember her coming in the door after teaching in Santa Paula. She came to see the folks. I still remember that hug."
After graduation Dick and Margaret could not afford to get married. Dick, like many others, did not have a job. But he and Margaret were anxious to get married-they had been together since 1933. In 1937 his parents finally relented; after the wedding, they supported the newlyweds.
In 1939 Dick left acting for a career as a photographer. He learned the tri-color carbro printing process out of a book and purchased a one-shot color camera, enabling him to shoot live subjects. By using mirrors and filters, a one-shot camera created three separate negatives in the camera with one shot. These separation negatives were then used to print the bromides for making a tri-color pigment print, or carbro. Dick used the one-shot long before switching to transparencies. These were expensive cameras at the time, and only working professionals could afford them.
There was a spare room in the garage at his parent's home, a servant's quarters, with an 8x10 bathroom that Dick converted into a darkroom.
After he and Margaret were married, they lived on 2nd Street, and he would walk to work at the darkroom above the garage. During this period he photographed his father and made a carbro print of the picture, which he still says to this day is the perfect print.
Dick worked mainly in advertising and commercial photography. There were a number of other photographers in Hollywood at the time, but Paul Hesse was one of the few working in carbro. However Hesse could not make his own prints-he was not a darkroom man but mainly a promoter and photographer. John Kelly made all the carbro prints that Hesse was famous for. Dick met Kelly and over time became friends with him.
In 1939, Dick and Margaret's first daughter, Linda, was born. Dick shot pictures of Linda primarily with a one-shot color 6x9 mm camera and the 5x7.
When Linda was two, Dick borrowed a 2 ¼ x3 ¼ from the B. B. Nichols shop downtown, took her picture, and made a carbro. He sent the picture to the Saturday Evening Post. "I didn't know they didn't buy photos." But in 1941 Dick's carbro print of his daughter was adopted as a cover, one of only two photographic Post covers that year and the first that Dick had ever sold. When he told Hesse that the Post had bought his image for a cover, Hesse thought Dick was lying since he, after years of trying, had never been able to sell a cover to the Post. That cover got Dick the attention of some NY agents and enabled him to sign up with the Freelance Photographer's Guild. He sent them material, and they sold more covers.
But although Dick persisted in doing photography, selling a few things, he was not earning a decent living at it. Before the war started, jobs were scarce. Then the war came. At that point, "you could either go into the service or get a war job," he remembers.
In 1941, looking for employment, Dick attended a group sales pitch presented by North American Aviation and Lockheed for the purpose of hiring wartime employees. Dick got a job in the photo department at North American and began at last to earn a steady income from his photography. At North American, he also met the photographer Brett Weston, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.
"We both had gas coupons [special ones for defense industry employees]. We combined our coupons in order to save them up. Bret said we should take a trip to the desert to take pictures. It was a great friendship-lasted the rest of my life." They took driving trips with Margaret and friends to the desert and other locations, shooting pictures and having picnics.
Finally, Brett could no longer stand working at North American and went to Lockheed for another one or two months. Then he enlisted in the Army and was sent to New York City. "It was a perfect job for him," Dick remembers. "He lucked out. He worked the night shift, slept all night on the job, and then did his own work during the day." Between 1942 and 1944, Dick and Margaret had two more daughters, Janice (Jan) and Margaret (Peg). Although his day job at North American was to photograph airplanes and provide illustrations for service manuals, Dick still pursued his own work on the side.
He started using Kodachrome transparency film in lieu of the three-color camera. He sold some of his photographs through the Freelance Photographers Guild and freelanced his other work to Liberty and This Week magazines, among others. Kodachrome came in cut film sizes: first the 35mm, then 4x5, 8x10 and even 11x14. "At that time the magazines did not accept 35mm," he says. "But later they found they could get perfectly good results from Kodachrome 35mm."
In 1944-45 the war ended in Europe, and for just one week it was safe to quit. So Dick quit.
"One day in 1944 , across the street from Technicolor, I saw a shop: Gasparcolor. They needed a printer, so I took the job. Right after that the draft got tough, and they took all the guys at North American." But Dick had an exemption when he went to work for Dr. Bela Gaspar. Gasparcolor, the dye bleach process on which the Cibachrome (now called Ilfochrome) process was based, was considered vital to the war effort, and Gaspar was able to provide Dick with an exemption based on Dick's being essential to his work-he was the only printer able to test and print with the material as it was being developed.
"The day I first went into Gasparcolor, the sample prints on the wall were faded. So I made sample prints and replaced the ones on the wall. I tested all their new materials with my own pictures from Kodachrome. Dr. Gaspar loved my work and was very happy to use my images," he remembers. "Dr. Gaspar let me keep my own prints. The Gaspars faded on the wall, but in the dark, they lasted forever."
While working for Gaspar, Dick met Nicholas Muray and Paul Outerbridge, who had come for a demonstration of the process.
Although he had many offers, Gaspar always refused to sell the rights to his process. After Dick left and Gaspar died, Paul Dreyfus, who was the chemist and technician for Gaspar, went to work for CIBA AG. When the patents ran out, he developed the process for Cibachrome.
At this time Robert Coburn offered Dick an opportunity to join IATSE #659, the entertainment industry photographer's union, so that he could print color at Columbia. Dick declined, choosing to remain independent and to pursue his freelance work. "All during those years I worked weekends, selling to magazines. I sent them the Kodachromes."
In March and April 1946, Dick photographed a model provided through the Blue Book Models agency, run by Emmeline Snively from an office in the Ambassador Hotel, on the bottom floor. The model's name was Norma Jeane Dougherty.
Emmeline said, "I've got a real cute girl. You ought to see her." Three or four other photographers were already shooting her. "She was a cutie, and they had sold some covers of her already," Dick says. He hesitated because the magazines did not like to use covers of the same girl that others already had used. But he finally decided to hire her, and on March 2, Dick and Norma Jeane took a trip. He posed her leaning against a tree, then on the beach, and finally on a fence. They left the beach abruptly. "I remember the crowd was collecting very fast. A lot of men."
"I did not shoot her for very long. The market was already saturated," he recalls. But Dick did sell a cover of Norma Jeane to True Romance. "She was nice when she was Norma Jeane, very sweet. She came to dinner at the house. A nice, friendly girl." Then she went to work for the studios, eventually becoming Marilyn Monroe. Dick photographed her after she had become a celebrity and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
"I met Marilyn Monroe again on Some Like It Hot. I was the still photographer." She smiled and said, "Hi, Dick" but was not interested in reviving their friendship. From 1946-54 Dick went to work as an assistant to photographers Valentino Sarra, Ruzzie Green, and John Engstead on commercial jobs. Ruzzie Green was a big-shot NY photographer. "He was a very nice guy and hired me as a helper. I photographed celebrities for Family Circle, Parents, American Weekly, Colliers, Life and Time, mostly on assignment through the agency.
I used a Contax 1. But I always wanted a Contax 2. I bought the Contax 1 just before the 2 came out and I did not have enough money to switch. I felt I had been had. The 2 was just a better camera." Dick also continued his freelance work, photographing children and animals for calendars and magazine covers.
In 1952, needing regular income, Dick went to work as the television lighting director at KLAC, where he stayed until 1955. "I just went in with a portfolio and got the job. I worked on the sets for commercials, all live TV, no second chance. Not too many people around who could do it. But then videotape came out and changed the whole world, and live TV was finished."
Returning once again to freelance work from 1955 to 1962, Dick was on retainer at Globe Photos, covering the entertainment industry. Charles Bloch at Globe hired Dick on a daily basis for assignments. "I worked day to day, depending on the assignments." In time, he covered more than seventy films.
His first on-location assignment was for Giant (1955), where his job was to shadow James Dean. When Dean died, a lot of pictures of him were sold and provided Dick with much-needed income. The death had a big impact on Dick, since he and Dean had developed a close relationship based on a mutual interest in Porsches. So Dick felt as though he had lost a friend.
In 1962 Linda, Dick and Margaret's first daughter, died at the age of 24. This tragedy left a deep wound in the family. Beginning in 1962, Dick went into semi-retirement, only occasionally shooting stills on motion pictures sets but primarily pursuing his own photographic interests. In 1964 he and Margaret bought property in Calabasas. For some time during the 1970s, Dick experimented with grinding pigment and coating his own pigment transfer papers to create carbros. Most of the materials were no longer manufactured, and what was available was of poor quality. The most difficult item to obtain was the uncoated bromide needed to make the tri-color transfers in the carbro process. This uncoated bromide was bought by convincing a manufacturer to make a special run, and Dick was able to make a few tri-color test prints.
All through these years Dick and Brett Weston had maintained their long-standing friendship. Brett often came to Dick's homes-first in Hollywood, then Sherman Oaks, then Encino, and finally Calabasas-to show his newest work to private gatherings.
In 1969 Dick met Michael Andrews, who was temporarily visiting on R&R leave from Vietnam and who left his newly acquired Rollei 2¼ outfit with Dick, a camera Dick loved using. He and Michael became friends, and Michael left the Rollei with Dick until he needed to sell it in 1979 to fund a motorcycle ride through South America. During the years of their long friendship, Dick and Michael often discussed what a miracle it would be if it should ever become possible to print an archival pigment print directly from a computer. In their imaginations, this was not likely to happen in their lifetime. But Michael eventually printed a digital portfolio of Dick's pictures of Norma Jeane, as well as the color portion of Dick's images of the Weston family.
In 1979 Dick met photographer Reece Vogel, who was interested in making carbros. In 1984, they rescued materials and equipment from McGraw Colorgraph when its defunct plant was being shut down. Reece eventually printed the black and white silver prints of the portfolio of Dick's pictures of the Westons.
In 2003 Dick was confined to a wheelchair due to degenerating bone in the cervical area of his spine. Although he retains the use of his hands to some degree, his ability to make prints and even operate his camera has been seriously curtailed.
Always having had hermetic tendencies, as the years passed Dick became ever more reclusive, until finally his world was reduced to two rooms with views of the surrounding mountains, to Margaret, and to his wheelchair. Margaret, although physically capable, fell progressively into dementia. The more she was whittled away, the greater her naturally sweet nature showed through. In June 2006, Dick's beloved Margaret passed peacefully on.
Since 2007, Dick has been living in New York's Hudson Valley with his daughter Jan.