Richard C Miller

Richard C. (Dick) Miller worked in Los Angeles as a photographer from the early 1940s to the 1970s. He did outstanding work in several fields.

Early in his career, in the 1940s, he took commercial photographs for magazines. To print these photographs, he used the carbro process, a little-known, 90+-step printing technique that uses pigment inks to make beautifully saturated, permanent color images.

NORMA JEANE/MARILYN MONROE

During that early period of his career, he hired a little-known model named Norma Jeane Dougherty–later known as Marilyn Monroe. His pictures of her are still stunning today. The last pictures he took of her were during the filming of Some Like It Hot.

His work on the Some Like It Hot set occurred during the Hollywood phase of his career. He photographed all the leading movie stars during the golden age of the movies, from Clark Gable to Shirley McLaine, at over 70 movie locations.

Among his best-known images from that period are of James Dean on the set of Giant, digital reproductions of which were featured at the 2007 opening of the Beverly Hills gallery, Celebrity Vaults. On that same set he also photographed Elizabeth Taylor, and some of his shots of Dean and Taylor together are iconic.

Throughout his career Miller shot photographs, both black and white and color, of landscapes, still lives, and people.

EXHIBITION AT THE GETTY MUSEUM

Almost 70 years after he did this work, in 2009 the Getty Museum featured Miller’s carbro prints–both commercial and the ones he took for his own pleasure–in a show on the carbro process.

After a lifetime spent in Los Angeles, Miller died at his home in the Hudson River Valley in 2010 at the age of 98.