by Margaret A. Miller
My father, Richard C. Miller, who worked in Los Angeles as a relatively unknown commercial photographer before lapsing into a disappointed early retirement in his fifties, at the age of 96 had a room dedicated to his work at the Getty Museum. The show was on a printing process called “carbro,” a carbon-bromine alternative to Kodachrome that produced beautiful, saturated color photographs using pigments, not dyes. Carbros had one serious disadvantage: It took at least a day to make a single print, involving about 90 steps, each of which could go quite wrong.
My father’s carbros lay stacked on a closet floor and hung on our walls at home, admired only by family and friends, for over 70 years. Made originally to sell as magazine covers and calendar pictures, in the glossy perfection with which they capture the evanescent moment, they epitomize a kind of art that’s as American as jazz.
But my father—with his photographer’s vision, amazing technical expertise, and relative indifference to the opinions of others—was a terrible businessman. He would mail his carbros off to distant editors—who often didn’t even do him the courtesy of returning them—many have vanished into corporate files. If he was lucky, the magazine paid him a pittance. No one but my dad (and his loyal family, I would like to say, but what did we know then?) thought they were worth the time it took to make them.
But he kept on working this way because he cared more about the pictures and about the process of creating photographs than about what his work would sell for. It was our great good fortune that my father’s parents were very generous to him and his family, and my mother helped keep the family afloat by running a nursery school.
I thought of my father when reading Margaret Merrion’s article on the future of art education in this issue. She stresses among other things art education’s need to focus on the “hot” fields (design, multi-media, and other fields requiring a mastery of new arts technologies)”—that enable graduates to get lucrative jobs. I certainly have nothing against lucrative jobs; while my father produced art, my mother scrambled to raise and educate three girls. But my father’s career makes me wonder if we distort what we’re about when we use the economic benefits of a college education to the individual as a justification for what we do.
It’s pretty clear that a college education (Stanford, Pomona, USC) didn’t do my father much good economically. Miserable as a math teacher, he taught himself carbro printing from a book. (My father had an early version of “home schooling,” and his tutor probably deserves credit for his abilities to read a self-instruction manual.) As Alison Wolf pointed out in the last issue of Change, the putative economic benefits of college vary widely, depending among other things on major. My father’s best-earning year didn’t arrive until he was 95; he now needs a tax accountant and an entertainment lawyer.
It takes one or both of the following things to make a college education pay off: a subordination of passion to calculation (unless your passion is calculation, the “green deal” as I once heard a board member call it) or the luck that what you love to do is something that society is willing to produce regular pay for. We professors often fall in the latter, blessed category, as Anna Neuman’s article about the passion of scholars in the March/April 2009 issue of Change made clear. I experienced this epiphany as a college student when I looked up from the Victorian novel I was reading and exclaimed, “They’ll PAY me to do this!” But many of our most creative students do not.
So what is our role in their lives? To help them develop the skills and vision that will enable them to most fully realize their genius? To expose them to “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, so that they know the nature of the company they’d like to keep? To make them whole and complete individuals? To give them, as my art-major son said in his college admission essay, stories worth telling?
Maurice O’Sullivan, in his defense of a liberal-arts education in this issue, talks about preparing students for their careers as parents and as people. That I believe. Perhaps it was his college education that nourished my father’s endless curiosity. And maybe his curiosity is responsible for the wide range of my father’s work, of which the carbros are only one facet. His best friend Brett Weston, one of the great photographers of the 20th century with only an eighth-grade education, produced work that is much narrower in scope.
But O’Sullivan also wants to claim that the executive chef in his son’s restaurant owes his creativity in the kitchen to something he learned as an English major. Here I’m skeptical. I would argue that often, by making curious and passionate children into “good students,” clever as mockingbirds at imitating our songs until they forget or fail to invent their own, we squelch their creative powers. How much creativity do you get to exercise in your tenth five-page paper of the semester? We also may do them a disservice by our insistence that they spread themselves thin rather than following the track of their passion. I loved general education courses as a student— but then, the one Girl Scout honor I ever earned was the Dabbler’s Badge.
Paradoxically, it’s those same students who may hold the key to our future prosperity. As Wolf argues, it’s our inventiveness as a people that has fueled America’s prosperity, and by definition, we don’t know what form that inventiveness will take in the future they’ll help to create. We have the Internet entrepreneurs that O’Sullivan talks about in large part because of college dropouts such as Bill Gates.
Gates is clearly exceptional—less a model for students to emulate than an icon of the creativity that fuels invention in all fields, not just art. But students with gifts of this sort aren’t guaranteed to prosper once they leave us, and we do them a disservice if we imply that a college education assures them of a comfortable future. My father’s life suggests that creativity and creature comforts are not a marriage made in heaven. I hate to think what would have happened to our family without my grandparents’ support and my mother’s spine and entrepreneurial spirit.
Would we have fewer students, at least in the humanities and arts, if word got out that we don’t guarantee them marketable skills? The students who see college as instrumental will migrate (and are migrating) to the obviously practical disciplines. The job of the liberal arts faculty is probably to ensure that such students leave with their humanity developed to the fullest extent possible.
But for the fortunate students with a spark of the creative spirit that still marks my father even in extreme old age, maybe the best we can do is clear the path before them and stand aside, tossing them bananas and encouragement (no small gift) as they race past us towards their own quirky bliss.
You can see my father’s work online at richardcmiller.com.
—Margaret A. Miller
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