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Vanishing Vermonters tell their stories

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copyright the Chronicle October 25, 2017

 

Vanishing Vermonters, Loss of a Rural Culture, by Peter Miller. 168 pages. Paperback. Published by Silver Print Press. $24.95 paperback. $44.95 hard cover

 

Reviewed by Tena Starr

 

Peter Miller is the kind of photographer who transforms the ordinary into extraordinary. In his hands, an image of an empty road in the leafless late fall conveys both beauty and desolation. An abandoned Irasburg hunting camp dredges up a whole bag of emotions, including a bit of the kind of creeped out fear that has always beset children, and more adults than would like to admit it, in the company of abandoned, deteriorating buildings.

But Vanishing Vermonters is more than just a picture book. The book’s subtitle is Loss of a Rural Culture, and Mr. Miller tells stories here of people he considers iconic Vermonters, a breed of feisty, independent people that he believes is dying out.

Maybe he’s right; maybe he’s not. In any event, it’s a recurring theme with Mr. Miller, who has published five previous books. The last one was in 2013 and titled A Lifetime of Vermont People.

In the forward to Vanishing Vermonters, he writes that he’s old and had not planned on another book but he was prompted by e-mails he received after the publication of the last book, correspondence that supports his own perception that Vermont is moving away from the tough, hardscrabble place he loves.

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