Unequal Scenes

With Unequal Scenes, Johnny Miller has developed a distinctive visual language that radically transposes the tradition of artistic and topographical photography into the present. It is an atlas of our globalized present and, at the same time, a book about a new way of seeing.

For the first time, this internationally exhibited work is presented in a comprehensive monograph.

The strictly vertical, topographical photographs detach cities and landscapes from our familiar perspective and transform them into radical pictorial spaces of color, geometry, and density. The boundaries between rich and poor cut through the landscape. What initially appears to be an autonomous composition reveals itself upon closer inspection as a precise description of our present, in a tension between formal abstraction and social legibility.

For over ten years, Johnny Miller photographed cities and territories on several continents using a drone. His starting point was South Africa, where the spatial consequences of apartheid are still visible today in urban planning, property relations, and infrastructure. From there, Unequal Scenes expanded to encompass metropolises and landscapes in Africa, Asia, and North and South America. In an era where global image streams have transformed our view of the world, Miller reveals how social and economic inequality is inscribed as boundaries, transitions, and divisions within cities, landscapes, and territories.

Miller's photographs possess the formal unity of autonomous works of art and are simultaneously imbued with social information. In their radicalism and serial consistency, a distant affinity can be discerned with the photographic precision with which, for example, Michael Wolf condensed urban structures into a unique visual language.

This is precisely where the extraordinary power of these photographs lies. Their visual presence initially draws the eye to the formal order of the images; only upon closer inspection do the political, historical, and social conditions condensed within them become legible. One can open this book because of its pictures, and inevitably begins to reflect on the world that produced them.

The book is accompanied by texts from the internationally renowned urban researcher Edgar Pieterse, the photographer, publisher, and curator Thomas Gust, and Johnny Miller himself. The result is a book situated between artwork and critical cartography, combining the visual impact of a large-scale photobook with the precision of a social study. Thus, Unequal Scenes extends far beyond the realm of photography, making it equally relevant to art, architecture, urbanism, design, and contemporary culture.

Johnny Miller shows us the world we live in, and yet we've never seen it like this before!

– Buchkunst Berlin

Photographs from the project have been on the cover of TIME and featured by National Geographic, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN and Der Spiegel.