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I grew up in San Francisco, raised by a beat poet father and a mother who studied European history and created textile art. I was homeschooled in the John Holt “unschooling” approach, which meant my education was immersive, self-directed, and rooted in curiosity rather than curriculum. I attended community college many times, always earned strong grades, and never once managed to care enough about the paperwork to complete a degree.
I’ve spent most of my life supporting other artists, activists, and creative communities. In Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, I served as a public arts commissioner, volunteered with The Center’s food bank, and contributed photography to the Greater Palm Springs Pride Volunteer Photography Program. I thought my creative role was to uplift others: documenting, journaling, archiving, and producing media for people whose work I admired.
I didn’t consider myself an artist until recently—until projection photography became a mode of speech that I had been searching for. Through this medium, I discovered a way to weave individuals' memories with cultural events and to confront universal questions about love, loss, caregiving, and survival.
My work now focuses on emotional documentary, projection photography, and social art practice—methods that allow me to collaborate with my subjects, amplify their voices, and create images that feel like living memories rather than reenactments.
My mission is simple:
To tell personal stories that intersect with cultural history and universal axioms by creating images that bring people together.
Brown Miller is a Palm Springs–based photographic artist working at the intersection of emotional documentary, projection photography, and social art practice. His work centers queer memory, intergenerational storytelling, and the embodied residue of historical trauma—particularly the long afterlife of the AIDS epidemic.
Using high-resolution digital projection in a traditional studio environment, Miller layers archival images, personal memories, and cultural symbols directly onto living bodies and physical objects. This process collapses time: past and present appear simultaneously in the frame, merging into what he describes as “interdimensional spaces where history becomes a physical presence.” The technique turns light into sculpture—bending across skin, diffracting in air, and transforming rigid pixels into organic emotional textures.
Miller’s photographic practice is deeply collaborative. He constructs safe, intentional environments where subjects engage not in performance but in personal excavation. As emotions rise naturally—grief, tenderness, memory, fear—the camera captures them in a single shutter release. The resulting images function as portraits but also as expressionist dreamscapes, visualizing the thoughts and feelings and gritty realities beneath the surface level.
His ongoing project The Last Hug, developed alongside writer and nurse Michael Harbin, reflects this ethos fully. Through layered projections and quiet reenactment, Miller reveals how one nurse’s final morning with an AIDS patient has echoed across four decades. The work merges personal memory with cultural history, serving as preservation, activism, and spiritual inquiry. Presented as an enclosed installation, the exhibited work is hung in a dark, narrowing hall with candles to light the way and an interactive video installation at the end.
Miller’s art is not about reconstructing events—it is about revealing the emotional truth beneath them.