Mary Louise (ML) Miller

Mary-Louise Miller (ML) grew up in the small Southern town of Summerton, SC where she received her first camera upon high school graduation and later began to hone her skills as a photographer. Today, ML is a street, documentary and portrait photographer who work focuses on the South, human rights and the environment. In 1994 she returned home to begin photographing her home town in earnest, producing a body of work related to the Briggs v. Elliott school desegregation case. In addition to her documentary work of the town and its residents, ML focused on the individuals that were petitioners in the first school desegregation case, Briggs v. Elliott, which was incorporated into the Brown Decision of 1954. Photographic portraits of the Briggs v. Elliott petitioners are held in the permanent collection the Modjeska Monteith Simkins Center for Justice, Ethics and Human Rights, Columbia, SC; the Smithsonian Institutes African American Museum of History and Culture and currently hang in SC Congressman James Clyburn’s office on Capitol Hill,Washington, DC. 

ML had the pleasure of documenting the two terms of former SC Governor Richard W. Riley’s (US Secretary of Education), editing a nine-volume set of selected photographs documenting the eight years of the Riley administration to include visiting national and world leaders and dignitaries to include former US President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalind Carter, US Vice President Walter Mondale; Joan Mondale; former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; former US Attorney General and Governor Dick Thornburgh; NASA Space Shuttle Astronaut Ron McNair; The Reverend Jessie Jackson; Saint Teresa of Calcutta; Coretta Scott King; the Reverend Martin Luther “Daddy” King, Sr.; Dr. Benjamin E. Mayes; West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Ella Fitzgerald; Dizzy Gillespie; Alabama; former Senator and civil rights activist I.D. Quincey Newman; and former SC Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal, to name a few. She is presently working on a monograph titled “The Riley Years” which brings together the photographic images created during the Riley Administration. 

Photographic prints of the Riley administration are held in the University of South Carolina’s Political Collections, Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, Thomas Cooper Library, Columbia, SC; the SC State Museum, Columbia, SC; and the SC Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC. 

As a freelance photographer, her work has been published internationally byleading publications (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, to name a few) and by major corporations