Fair Culture: Images from Indiana Fairs

In August 2005 Harold Lee Miller, a nationally known photographer with offices in Indianapolis and New York, started a series of photographs of 4-H participants at the poultry and rabbit barns of the Indiana State Fair. Miller expanded his project to include people and activity from fairs held in Jackson, Elkhart, Dubois, Delaware, Washington, Owen, Monroe, Knox, Jay, and Marion counties. In addition to Miller s more than one hundred photographs, the book includes an essay by Gerald Waite exploring the history of fairs from the Middle Ages to modern times, the growth of the institution in Indiana, and what fair culture says about those who participate in this annual ritual of midwestern life. As Miller notes, The people in these images are special, in the way that all people are special. . . . Part of what I m trying to accomplish is to show just how interesting and uncommon each of these individuals really is, whether they know it or not. Each and every human photographed in this book is now part of our recorded American history, and in a hundred years that generation will see our unique presence in a way that we can t see it now marvel at our clothes, our faces, and our humanity, and thank us for letting ourselves be living artifacts of our time.

Paperback. 200 pages. 2011, Indiana Historical Society Press. By Harold Lee Miller, Photography and Gerald Waite, Essays.