Peter Miller, defender of a vanishing Vermont, has died

Miller was most recognized for his award-winning photography, the subject of which was always Vermont: its skiers and slopes, its barns and hollows and the people who lived in those barns and hollows. But it was his words that gave context to his pictures, and his words were often the primary tool — even more so than his photography — for both his defense and championing of the rural traditions he saw slowly disappearing and for the acerbic criticism he leveled against those he saw as primarily responsible for their deterioration.

“Photography and writing is why I am on earth. My job is to communicate through the people and places I care about, which is Rural America,” Miller wrote in his foreward to “Vanishing Vermont: Loss of a Rural Culture,” his last published book. “I have great admiration for our country’s beauty and respect and love for the people I have photographed — my extended family. I am woven into the fabric of the Vermont culture — a flatlander born in Manhattan but a resident of Vermont since 1947 when I was 13.”

Miller came to photography early in life, purchasing a camera on a whim at 16 with insurance money received after his hunting rifles were stolen. He parlayed this early enthusiasm for the pictorial arts into a gig with Life magazine before returning to become the patron saint of photography in Vermont, where he served as a contributing editor at Ski magazine for several decades.

Throughout the 1970s, his photographs often appeared in Vermont Life, in local newspapers and in national magazines. He published “The 30,000 Mile Ski Race” in 1973, which examined in great detail the underlying reasons why American skiers were so inferior to their European counterparts at the time.

A longtime resident of Colbyville, a hamlet of Waterbury, Miller was also intimately connected to Stowe, a town he loved deeply even as it came to represent, to him, all that was wrong with the direction Vermont was moving through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st.

He often held court at The Shed, the now legendary Stowe dive bar where he rubbed shoulders with many of the people he would write about in his later books, like his good friend Marvin Moriarty, with whom he cried over tequila shots on the bar’s last night in 2011.

In the pages of the Stowe Reporter, Miller’s mischievous wit was often on display. He took Republican state senator Fred Westphal, for grousing about harassment from the press during the Watergate era. In 1975, he sardonically advertised a gossip hotline in which he urged Stowe residents to call in and share their issues, claiming that “gossip is the life blood of a small town. Isolation living does lead to occasional bouts of vacuousness of the mind, which of course leads to gossip. But what else is there to talk about? Who else?”

In the 1980s, Miller continued to be recognized for his artful photographs and started holding local seminars for aspiring photographers, but also continued to escalate his criticism against his beloved, enraging Stowe as it entered a new period of sustained growth.

In a long letter sarcastically detailing the plight of the woodcocks who took up residence on a plot of land that was about to become yet another condominium complex, Miller detailed how the birds never put a strain on the town utilities but also pointed out that they never paid taxes.

“Stowe is finally eradicating its oldest line of residents and migratory woodcock who have called Stowe home are by-passing the town and vow never to come back. We hope they find more hospitable quarters. They are, at least, more mobile than another Stowe resident that is being disenfranchised — the woodchuck,” Miller wrote, using the term in reference to the traditional Vermonter being squeezed out of the ski resort town.

When a developer threatened to displace a hog farm on Landmark Meadow with a new motel, Miller lampooned the pitch along with Stowe’s eagerness to capitalize on tourism by encouraging the town to remake itself into a Mecca for pigs, employing all the double entendres available to him in the process.

Miller was also, however, keenly sensitive to the conservationist policies championed by the state’s Democrats and progressives that increased the tax burden on cash-strapped Vermonters, diagnosing them as exclusionary efforts to gate off Vermont communities to keep them “pure” but only accessible to the few and, often, the white, as he wrote in 1987 when protesting the burden of trash collection costs imposed by then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin’s waste disposal reforms.

In a 1989 letter, Miller wrote that Stowe could be usefully turned into a “university study center to show how Americans can slowly but surely turn a beautiful village and town into a caricature of their culture.”

The accelerating buildup of the 1980s gave way to what Miller diagnosed as Stowe’s full-on “gentrification” in the 1990s. He also boldly self-published his defining work, “Vermont People,” a collection of black and white portraits alongside a monograph about what really made Vermonters, Vermonters, and a population that Miller considered to already be in the decline.

“The old Vermonters shown in this book are, to me, the backbone of this state. They give Vermont an intangible quality as much as a part of the country as that sharp northwestern wind that comes in under a flat-gray sky in late October,” Miller wrote in “Vermont People.”

Miller claimed that he was turned down by 13 different New England publishers, who told him that a photography book about Vermont full of hardscrabble monochrome portraits instead of technicolor foliage and idyllic landscapes would never sell.

According to Miller, he went on to sell 15,000 copies of the book, and in the process cemented his name as a protector of The Green Mountain State’s people and their traditions.

Galvanized by the moment, he leaned into his practice of photography as polemic for the rest of his life. In 1993, he headed west to capture agricultural traditions of the Great Plains states, already long past their glory days.

In 1995, he exhibited photographs of the decaying structures at Mayo Farm as part of a community-led effort to preserve them and potentially convert them into a Vermont farming museum.

“The Mayo Farm is such a wonderful example of how land and architecture can be in harmony, a fact that seems lost on builders, developers and architects now at work in Stowe,” Miller said in a Stowe Reporter article announcing the exhibition. “If the Mayo Farm is torn down or razed, it is a sure sign that Stowe has either lost its soul or has just given up or sold out.”

The buildings he captured were eventually demolished by a vote of the Stowe Selectboard, though the Mayo Farm itself had been conserved.

The century turned and the forces eroding the traditional Vermont way of life he had clamored against for decades — the rising levels of taxation compared to the relatively stagnant wages, the influx of flatlanders and second homeowners — only accelerated, and soon began to weigh on him personally.

In 2013, he published an updated and expanded version of his earlier book as “A Lifetime of Vermont People.” A few years later, he announced that he was “Vermont broke,” the owner of a house but, in his old age, short on income, and began renting a room in his home through Airbnb.

He was voted “Mr. Waterbury” in a 2016 reader’s choice poll through the Stowe Reporter’s 4393 awards, but declined the honor, claiming that he was already “The Mayor of Colbyville,” and took the opportunity to contemplate succession.

“Should we secede from the town and village of Waterbury, the state of Vermont, which is out of control, and the United States government, which is turning scary?” he wrote. “Can we stop that slimy creature called Sprawl? And should we rename our cluster of buildings and GPS coordinates to Ben & Jerryville or Heady Topper Town?”

The next year, he published his swan song, “Vanishing Vermont,” another compilation of people who, to him, represented the one true Vermont way of life, which he now fully acknowledged was on the way out.

He, too, looked to join in on the vanishing and put his Colbyville home on the market in 2019, but true to his tireless woodchuck spirit, he couldn’t quite commit to leaving the Green Mountains behind entirely.

“I don’t want to move out of the state,” he told the now-defunct Waterbury Record. “There are people in Vermont who want to move to Florida, but it will be a cold day in hell when I move to Florida.”