Tumulus is a collection of photographs by John Miles. Published by invisible inc, it contains 112 pages with fifty black and white photographs, an interview between John
Miles and the New Yorker photographer Steve Pyke, and a short story written by Miles called The Window.

‘Howard’s school had been closed for two weeks because of the gathering intensity of the ‘air raids’... In a way, he was quite pleased to spend more time dwelling on the mysteries created by his nightly vigils, which in atmosphere reminded him of his favourite book about a Frenchman who wanted to live under the sea and build cities for the future. Given the present rate of destruction, Howard hoped the plans were well under way. When he looked at the framed drawings of this man’s dream, the images inevitably transported him back to his window; not a window on to the world, but a window which somehow reinterpreted what was happening in his mind. It was like looking from inside back to a similar but more real interior.’

The Window is the story of a boy who watches with awe as
his suburban world is bombed. The frame is his bedroom window, and through it his neighbours’ burning houses become a beautiful crystal tableau. If this boy is John Miles, the window is now the camera lens, and the scenes that unfold hold just as much portent.

‘A man, protected from the weather by a mac and umbrella, tries to coax a toy dog to go for a walk. One senses something desperate in his antics… Who or what is one looking at? The question occurs repeatedly as you try to decipher images that mix photocopy with photography… Miles is immersed in the technical possibilities of his medium, brilliantly exploiting them to achieve strange, often symbolic images. His vision is as bleak as it is idiosyncratic’
Sarah Kent, Time Out

Stick a compass into the West Dorset village of Loders on a 1 inch Ordnance Survey map and draw a circle with a radius of ten inches. You will find the location of ninety per cent of John Miles’ photographs.

In a small living room, the head of a woman in spectacles
and a shower cap protrudes from a corrugated sauna. She
is lit from above by a small chandelier. In one of the plush armchairs sits her husband, on the screen of the TV two men wear suits and balaclavas. In another image, a smoking man looks wistfully out of a window. A child’s hand emerges
from the neck of his jersey and tenderly feels his face. Dying captures the final hours of an injured cow as it lies in the road surrounded by the splintered branches that have broken its fall. In For Redon, A boy with a banjo serenades the slumped body of a dead fox. Grotesque, poignant, and often humorous, the viewer wonders what is constructed and what has been stumbled upon by chance. What has Miles found ‘out there’, and how much of it is really ‘in here’?

‘This is, indeed, our world, but we have never seen it like this before – could not see it like this, because the photographer’s
eye has gone many steps beyond merely selecting a frame and
an angle. The eye, the brain and the feelings work as one; the resulting image is deeply personal, utterly individual.’
Chris Fassnidge

John Miles was born in Surrey in 1939. He studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art and Goldsmiths’ College and started taking photographs in 1964. His work has been exhibited in the UK, US, Italy, Chile, France and Spain. He lives and works in Dorset.

Tumulus
Published by invisible inc
November 2005
£30 Hardcover
ISBN 0-9551357-0-2