Johnny Miller is a photographer, artist and drone journalist based in South Africa and the USA. His series Unequal Scenes photographs the walls, roads, and buffer zones that separate rich and poor neighborhoods, using aerial photography to make inequality legible. The work has appeared on the cover of Time and in National Geographic, The Guardian and many other outlets.
He is currently a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, in the Center for Environmental Neuroscience, where he connects visual work to research on environmental inequality and brain health. He has co-authored papers in Nature Medicine, Alzheimer's & Dementia, and Neuroscience, and is building Unequal World, a public platform mapping environmental and economic inequality across cities worldwide.
Johnny is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, a Senior Fellow at Code for Africa, and co-founder of africanDRONE, a pan-African initiative using drones for public-interest storytelling and mapping. He is represented by Buchkunst Berlin and lives between Berlin, Cape Town, and the USA.
He can be reached at johnny@unequalscenes.com.
Photo: Felipe Meireles
UNEQUAL SCENES - PROJECT STATEMENT
Unequal Scenes uses aerial photography to make inequality visible.
From above, what can feel normal from the ground becomes harder to ignore: neighborhoods divided by highways, walls, rivers and rail lines; informal settlements pressed up against wealthy households; entire communities excluded. What interests me is not only contrast, but repetition. Again and again, across very different places, the same shapes appear. The same separations. It’s the very scale and unerring regularity across geographic regions which points to the systemic nature of inequality.
By using drones and helicopters for this project, I wanted to peek over the walls in my city and enter forbidden liminal territory. I wanted to see exactly what these empty places looked like. What I found, unsurprisingly, was that these landscapes are not accidental. They are designed, reinforced and maintained. It was hard to look straight down on those divisions without the unsettling realization that I, and we, the people gazing at these scenes, are implicated in the systems that produce them. Unequal Scenes is about making visible the structures we have learned to live inside, and showing that what looks natural in the city is often anything but.
