johnny Miller
Johnny Miller is a photographer, filmmaker, artist and drone journalist based in South Africa and the USA. His work moves between photography, urbanism, inequality, health and the built environment, using visual tools — from aerial photography to satellite data to AI-built platforms — to make large structural forces legible.
His work has been published in National Geographic, the cover of Time Magazine, The Guardian, and many other books, reports, and films. He has co-authored articles in top journals such as Neuroscience and Nature Medicine, and is currently working to integrate AI-built visualization tools into the research of Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin). He is represented by Buchkunst Berlin and has exhibited Unequal Scenes at photo fairs and exhibitions around the world.
Johnny is a Senior Fellow at Code for Africa, an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, and a BMW Responsible Leader. He is also the co-founder of africanDRONE, a pan-African initiative focused on using drones for public-interest storytelling, mapping, and analysis, and the director of Millefoto, his wider studio for photography, film, and visual storytelling.
He can be reached at johnny@unequalscenes.com.
Photo: Michael O. Snyder
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.
