Eric Miller (photographer)

Eric Miller (born 1951) is a professional photographer based in South Africa. Miller was born in Cape Town but spent his childhood in Johannesburg. After studying psychology and working in the corporate world for several years, Miller was driven by the injustices of apartheid to use his hobby, photography, to document opposition to apartheid by becoming a full-time photographer.

Miller began his work as a freelance photographer with a collective called Afrapix, which used photography to document the realities of apartheid and the resistance to the regime during the 1980s. Miller first got the attention of the international wire services with a photograph of a mineworker and his partner in a room of a mineworkers' hostel. The photo was particularly meaningful as the unions were fighting for family housing for mine workers, rather than single-sex hostels which forced workers to leave their families behind to make a living. Soon after, Miller was hired for his first international lead, taking photographs of the 1987 strike in which over 300,000 mine workers across South Africa walked off the job. The majority of Miller's work early in his career was the documentation of strikes, protests and funerals which were manifestations of people's opposition to the apartheid regime and contributed to its eventual downfall. For three years from 1988, Miller worked for Reuters.

During the early 1990s, as the world witnessed the crumbling of the apartheid government, the subject matter of Miller's work changed from protests and funerals to the negotiations that would eventually lead to a democratic South Africa. Once the transition to a post-apartheid government began, the focus of his and others' photography was on transformation issues such as health, education and labour.

After Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February 1990, Miller gained access to countries across Africa that had previously been closed to South African passport holders. The first place Miller travelled to after Mandela's release was South Sudan, to document the famine that occurred there in the 1990s. He has pursued photographic projects in 28 different countries including Botswana, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

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