SIERRA VISTA — All Ernie Miller knew he wanted was to be in the military. He didn’t believe he’d actually come back from Vietnam, let alone come away a photographer.
Miller, now a part-time art student at Cochise College, was in the Vietnam War between 1966 and ’67. The experience produced a 40-photo exhibit, titled “Faces of Vietnam,” which is partially on display in the lobby of the Andrea Cracchiolo Library on the Cochise College Sierra Vista Campus through the beginning of November.
Ernie Miller looks at pieces of his photography exhibit in the library on the Cochise College Sierra Vista Campus.
The exhibit includes a little action, lots of scenery and several portraits of Vietnamese children and adults, as well as Miller’s comrades, all taken with the Petri Flex 7 he bought from the small PX on base.
“The only camera I’d used before was a brownie box camera,” he laughed. “But I read the book to make this one run, and the light meter told me when it was good.”
Years later, Miller went back to college in 1989 at Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla. He was pursuing a degree in graphic technology with a focus on photography, and he decided to make contact prints of his Vietnam photos to show his photography instructor.
The next day, his instructor told him he had all the makings of a great show. The next semester, the photos were on display in a gallery on campus and featured as part of a TV station’s half hour “Focus on Art” segment.
“When (my instructor) was talking with the TV station,” Miller said. “He told them he didn’t know if I had an eye for good photography … or if I’d just gotten lucky.”
Each of the 8×10 photographs on display went through dark room treatment, with Miller cropping and using dodging and burning techniques to get them just right. A few years ago, Miller started printing a few at a time in color.
Two photos special to him are both of little girls who were part of a crowd of children that waded through water to gather near the soldiers and ask for rations. One photo is of a girl reaching out her arms for food. The other photo, his favorite of them all, is of an older girl staring at the camera while keeping her little sister close, covering her mouth with one hand and holding a couple of cans in the other.
He has photos of fishermen casting nets into a river. He’s got one, in color, of a Shell gas station that he’s disappointed isn’t quite close enough to show the price of gas. And he’s got a few portraits of himself in uniform, too.
Miller said he was always interested in being the military. He joined the reserves in 1956, at the age of 17, and waited a year until finishing high school to go active duty. He retired after eight years, got married, got divorced and re-enlisted.
“I went in knowing I was going to Vietnam,” he said. “And knowing I wasn’t coming back.”
Today, Miller has spent the last 10 years finding his ideal snowbird home. He tried Georgia, Myrtle Beach and south Texas before settling on Arizona, first in Wellton, then in Tombstone, where he’s been since June.
“I got old, can’t breathe anymore,” said Miller, then chided his home state, “and Kansas gets cold in the winter.”
He’s back in the classroom, now at Cochise College taking painting classes. When Miller mentioned his photography exhibit to longtime art instructor Al Kogel, he jumped on the opportunity to feature it in the campus library’s display cases.
Miller still carries a camera, a black Nikon digital point-and-shoot that fits in his breast pocket, and laughs at the way PhotoShop has taken away the fun and inventiveness of the dark room. His latest photos are a few shots of his new home in Tombstone.
“I haven’t done an awful to of photography since (Vietnam),” he said. “Mostly, it’s just stuff for me.”
“Faces of Vietnam” will be displayed on the Sierra Vista Campus through Nov. 5, in conjunction with a painting exhibit hung on the walls from artists belonging to Raices Taller, a Latino-based contemporary nonprofit cooperative art gallery and workshop in Tucson.