ABSTRACT
For over 50 years, the Miller Garden (designed by Dan Kiley, 1955–58; Columbus, Indiana, USA) was private, with access only occasionally granted to designers, academics, and professional photographers upon permission of the Millers. Such limited access meant that most landscape architects and scholars and the entirety of the public only knew the garden through Kiley’s plan of the garden and the photographs taken by multiple professional photographers and scholars. As a result, reception of the Miller Garden was largely mediated through these published documents. However, the photographs offer a selective portrayal of the garden, highlighting the Miller House and the modernist areas of the garden, usually in the summer when the vegetation is at its most luxuriant, during benign weather and environmental conditions.
Yet all landscapes continually change, including iconic 20th century modernist landscapes such as the Miller Garden. A single photograph documenting one view at one moment in time, then, does not adequately capture the dynamism of a landscape. This case study documents an engaged photographic approach with the Miller Garden through multiple site visits at different times of the day, across all four seasons, in the span of three years. Such an approach yields a more expansive spatial, temporal, and experiential representation of the garden, thereby enriching understanding of the garden and affording the opportunity for a more nuanced interpretation of the garden.
