For several hours, several  times   a month, a non-descript photo  studio in the Arts District is transformed as the circus comes to town. It’s no ordinary circus—it’s a sideshow, that mystery hidden behind the curtains that piqued the curiosity of every kid in America who went to the carnival or circus. It was that place your mother told you you were too young to see. You knew if you could just head down the midway for a moment you could sneak under the tent and all the wonders of the world would be revealed.

Over laughs and coffee at Café Metropol, photographer Brad Miller and I talked about our longing for the glory days of rock photography, how music photography isn’t like it used to be and how CDs ruined the great album cover (our faves: mine, Elton John’s “Captain Fantastic and the Brown dirt Cowboy”; Brad chose The Rolling Stone’s “Some Girls.”) We even had extremely similar experiences with the former photo editor of Vibe magazine, the venerable George Pitts, but he didn’t make Brad cry. And we talked at length about this project, tentatively titled, ‘Strange Girls’ that he has been working on since he first walked through my studio door.

It’s the Sideshow, kids! This time it’s not going to cost you fifty cents, you won’t have to sneak in under the tent, you won’t get in trouble with your Mom, and yes, all will be revealed in the pages of The Citizen. So, in the words of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.”

Linda Ford: Your commercial photography work is primarily music photography. How did you get started?

Brad Miller: When I got out of college, I moved to Minneapolis briefly; I was working on putting a rock band together. I was singing in bands and none of them never got off the ground, but in the meantime, I starting shooting my friend’s bands. And when I turned 30 I decided I was tired of bartending to support my art habit. So I started more seriously shooting everyone’s band that I knew and taking that to newspapers and sending things to magazines and eventually started shooting for local papers and local record labels, and then regional magazines found me and I started shooting for Option Magazine.

LF: Me, too.

BM: Then Alternative Press and after them, I met major record label publicists who started giving me work, so I sort of became a music photographer. Which was good, it wasn’t too much of a compromise. I could still approach it artistically and make a buck.

LF: Do you have a favorite subject that you photographed?

BM: Well, I have to say Marilyn Manson is an obvious one because he…Sadly, growing up on rock and roll and seeing big rock star bands Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Kiss and big spectacle bands, by the time I started shooting it was post hardcore—The Replacements, Uncle Tupelo, which became Wilco—flannel shirt bands and the artwork itself became very small,  because it was CDs instead of albums, so everything became smaller and less glamorous. So then Marilyn Manson comes along and it’s sort of the rebirth of the rock star. Suddenly you have the big visual spectacle back again. Most of the bands I was shooting were, like, pasty-faced boys in flannel shirts or wrinkled t-shirts who didn’t want their picture taken. They just wanted to be left alone so they could make music. It’s understandable. Marilyn Manson was fun; he had a visual concept and was really fun to take pictures of.

LF: So you’re drawn to the theatrical. Your current project is on the carnival Sideshow; how did you get involved with that?

BM: That was sort of a long evolution. I have always been fascinated with the Sideshow and carnival. I grew up in a small town and the carnival coming to town every summer was a big to-do. It was the high point of summer vacation and in the 70’s there were just remnants of Sideshow, a sad representation. I remember once I saw the Amazon Queen, and you’d pay your fifty-cents, go up a little catwalk and look into this little box that had this horrible paper mache monstrosity in it. Being 14, I wanted to ask them to let me remake it for them, because I could do so much better. [Laughs] Then the next year, I saw a spider woman, which was all done with mirrors. It was a woman’s head on a spider’s body, which I knew was fake but at least it was fascinating in that it was an old-school gaff. It was a traditional Sideshow trick.

With the theatrical photography, I like to create characters and put them in environments. Whether the environment seems real or not, it seems real to that character. Which is what theater is. I want the viewer to maybe not know who the person is, but I want them to wonder, to question, “Who is this person and what’s happening and what is this world?” And sideshow seems so perfect for that, because I think the best part of sideshow is in your mind. There’s always a disparity in what the outside talker sells you and what you end up seeing and the real magic is what happens in your speculation: is this person really this way and how do they live and what is the world in which this person lives?

So, it seemed like a perfect place to really be able to express a sort of parallel reality. In this series, I am approaching it not as a literal documentation of sideshow, but as the sideshow that exists in your mind. I have taken a lot of liberties with it, there’s more nudity involved than there is in actual carnival and some situations that may or may not ever really exist; but there are things that, in a nightmare after seeing or a dream about the Sideshow, might exist.

LF: How do you find your models/performers?

BM: That’s been the really fun part of it. I started out with the people I know. My wife is a dancer/performer and we together work with Desert Sin Dance Company.

LF: Who are they?

BM: They started as Middle Eastern belly dancers, in lay terms, but then they add on top. They don’t just dance as dancers, they create characters and tell stories through their dance; they modeled for me all the time. I discovered that I had become a little frustrated working with ‘real people,’ because sometimes they can’t really do the things you picture. Dancers, on the other hand, seem to be really comfortable telling stories with their body or creating tableaus. I discovered working with dancers to be very satisfying and they were very capable of doing what I was asking of them.

Through them, I started meeting actual circus performers. I met Chain Goddess, who’s an aerialist, who’s brilliant. She just finished a tour with Mötley Crüe as one of the circus aerialist performers. [She’s a] very talented woman who does aerial acts in chains and silks and all kinds of things. So I started working with people like that and finding actual performers. Heather Holiday from Coney Island came out and did her thing for a photograph.

LF: Which one was she?

BM: She was the sword swallower. She’s the world’s youngest female sword swollower and a Mormon girl to boot—which is an odd juxtaposition of things, a dichotomy. Then I started making gaffs—which in sideshow vernacular is sort of a trick. So some of my “freaks” or “prodigies” are actually, normal, average people.

LF: Like Troll-Girl.

BM: Yeah, like Troll-Girl, who is not a real troll that I captured in the woods. Some of my people who have unique physicalities are actual normal people, average people, and by using certain old school circus tricks, I make them appear to be freaks. Then I started meeting a certain number of actual prodigies. Each one leads to more and I’ll meet someone who says, “Oh you should meet my friend.” Oddly enough, I get lots of emails from average models that say they wished they had no legs or they wished they were some way deformed so they could be in one of my photographs. I know it’s hyperbole, but umm [laughs], it’s funny.

LF: Have you gone out to Coney Island since they have redone the sideshow on the boardwalk?

BM: I have not ever made it to Coney Island and I have to make a trip. Especially now [that] I know Heather, and I actually may be able to get a special tour and meet a few more of the people. I definitely have to go before this project is sealed. It’s the place. It still has the history. That’s my favorite aesthetic, something that was once fabulous and has sort of fallen into a bit of ruin…chipping paint, missing light bulbs. I love that. There’s a real re-birth of Sideshow worldwide, I am finding out more and more.

LF: There has been a backlash towards Sideshows, saying that they are exploitive. Have you thought about that possible backlash?

BM: I have a bit, but I’m not worried about that. I’ve done a lot of research on that and there were certain states, Florida for one, that did try to shut down the sideshow because they did think of it as exploitive. What they didn’t realize, but what they finally came to realize, was that these people, these freaks ([who] prefer to be called prodigies), formed a group and challenged this. They said, ‘we’re not being exploited, we’re stars, we’re making a living, we have people coming to see us, they want our autographs, we’re fawned over; and I could do nothing else, where am I going to find a job, I have no arms. I’m going to have a hard time getting a job.’ Now, [today] perhaps, it will be easier, it is still challenging, but in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s those people were not looked at as employment possibilities and this was a place where they could not only be employed, but feel like a star.

I think one of the beautiful things about sideshow is, it invites us to look at what we have been taught not to look at. I am trying to invite people to look at this work and embrace it in, hopefully, a respectful and beautiful way. Our humanity, as much as we try to avoid it, is a very tweaky thing. The more visceral and ugly sometimes, the more beautiful and real it is.

LF: When do you anticipate the book to come out?

BM: Oh, Lord, that’s a hard question. ‘Cause this is a project I can’t see ever ending, it’s always been such a part of me and now that it’s evolved and I’m making it actually tactile, I’m going to have a hard time leaving it. I think I’m just going to have to evolve into [doing] more and more things. I don’t know. But for this particular book, I am approaching being about halfway done. I still have images in my head that I have to get done before I can call this book—

LF:”—Volume one”

BM: [Laughs] Exactly. I am hoping that in a year I will be in the design stage and getting ready to go to press.

LF: It’s going to be very Proust-like—volumes.

BM: [Laughing] Exactly.

LF: You have created your own sets, built everything, painted your own scenery. What did you use for reference to give your images the look and feel that they have?

BM: I always loved the circus banners and have used them as backdrops before, and when I did the Desert Sin “Kali” photograph, the idea was to paint a circus banner—a sideshow banner without the subject, so that the women were the subject—and I photographed them with a ring light so it sort of placed them in the banner. I really liked the look of that, so I painted a whole bunch more of them and that’s sort of been a through line for a lot of the pieces—I have canvases that have been painted to look like the sides of circus tents and then I have the ones that look like banners.

I love doing that all myself. Unfortunately that’s one aspect that makes this project take so long. I think of a photograph that I want to make, then I think of all the things that need to be in it. Then I have to either build them or find them, so sometimes a year will go by and the model thinks I’m a total flake because I’ve asked them to do this picture and they’ve agreed and they don’t hear from me for a year and they think I’m just one more dizzy artist. That might be. [Laughs]

LF: You’re shooting this all old school: 4×5, Polaroid film. Would this work digitally?

BM: I could make it…a lot of guys make stuff look sort of like my stuff digitally, and that’s an art unto itself. I’ve got no problem with it, it’s a tool, a brilliant tool. I’m afraid that if I started using Photoshop on this project it would be Pandora’s box. I could just shoot Catherine, my wife, all day long. I could make her the strong man, the fat lady, I could make her conjoined twins, I could take her head off, I could take her legs off, there’s no stopping. I think part of the beauty in this is finding the actual people, creating the stuff in real time. And I love the happenstance, the accidental nature of this film. The borders on the edge, I’ve seen people do that digitally; my camera does it because that’s what it does, that’s what’s on the film, that’s how my camera sees on this film.

LF: Which camera are you using?

BM: I’m using a Linhof 4×5 press camera that was my Father’s. I found it in his apartment after he died. I had no idea he had it.

LF: How very Weegee of you.

BM: Exactly, yeah. The film itself gets those weird chemical splashes in the corner, it doesn’t complete so there will be pieces of emulsion missing, it gets holes and bubbles and scratches and that just adds to the antiquity, without trying to recreate it myself, it just happens by accident and that kind of adds art to what I’m trying to do. It adds its own thumbprint.

LF: Have you always shot 4×5, or is it just for your personal work projects?

BM: I started shooting 4×5 back when I was doing the music stuff but I was always impressed with, Frank Ockenfels, he was shooting a lot of 4×5 and I thought his work was beautiful. I love the textures; I love the selective focus, tilting the film plane. I’ve always loved shallow depth of field: just what you want is tack- sharp and then everything else is very romantic and fuzzy and out of focus. So I started shooting rock bands with a 4×5, which was challenging, but it added so much. It really helped, because there was very little art direction. Basically the art direction was ‘just make it look cool.’ Which is a curse and a blessing. It gives me freedom, but when I was working a lot and I would get a semi-boring subject I would have to create something out of nothing [with] this camera, you can take a picture of a chair and make it beautiful.

Fortunately, my wife Catherine is my muse, I shoot her continually, I could be happy just shooting her always, but unfortunately I think people would get tired of pictures of her, they may want a little more and I can’t be too obsessive about photographing her. But from working with her I have learned so much, because she would let me know if I was pissing her off [laughs], “Quit taking so damn long, that damn camera.” So I had to learn how to fill in the gaps between photographs because when you take a picture every couple of minutes it puts a lot of pressure on the model, so through working with her, she helped me understand the model’s perspective and develop a rhythm shooting with this camera that doesn’t make people want to cry or pull their hair out.

LF: We both have seen a slow down in our music photography careers. Have you seen that whole business change with the onset of the digital revolution?

BM: Oh, completely, I think unfortunately, and they are both digital considerations, and they work together: there’s a certain amount of the record business that has gone away and I don’t know if it will ever be recaptured because of technology, because if a kid can download a song for free, you’re kind of hard pressed to convince them they should go to the store and pay you a whole lot of money for it. So the record companies put out fewer records, spend less money per record and do less photo shoots per record. They used to do at least two, one art department and one publicity, and often a third and sometimes a fourth depending on the lifespan of the record. So they spent lots of money on promoting the record, not so much anymore.

Also, what goes along with that, is digital photography. You have a lot of people in my generation—people who wanted to be fashion photographers and found out they couldn’t, so we found other things to do; I started shooting music. Now music photography, celebrity photography and entertainment photography has become a huge thing. There are thousands of college students coming out of school every year thinking they are going to be this rock and roll photographer and they have this digital camera, so to them taking pictures is free. Free implies no value, so the art—the business of photography has become completely devalued. These kids, a lot of them, will do a photo shoot for little to no money because they’re just happy to be taking pictures and being in the same room with a band they have actually heard of. So, yes it’s changed a lot and I don’t see it coming back.

LF: We’re getting down to the end and it’s time for my favorite question. It’s your cocktail party, who would you invite?

BM: Wow, do they have to be alive?

LF: No, dead, alive…

BM: Hmm, Let’s see, I’d have to have Jesus there, just so he could set a few people straight. [Laughs] I think Marilyn Monroe-I’ve always been in love with her, Jan Saudek-he’s always been one of my favorite photographers. I can’t imagine what he’d be like in real life. The way he involves himself in his portraits/photographs, he seems like he’s an infamous partier. He would be good fun.

And as Brad says when he leaves the studio after a shoot, “It’s always sad when the circus leaves town.”


Brad Miller’s book, “Strange Girls” will be published by Ignition Publishing.
For more information on Brad Miller and to view more of his work, visit www.munkyhaus.com.

Linda Ford is an award winning photographer as well as Editor and Publisher of The Arts District Citizen.