Document Series #7
Softcover, 256 pages, 9 × 6.5 inches
ISBN: 978-1-7359242-2-9
Designed by Kyla Arsadjaja
Edition of 500
Printed in Italy
January 2022 (First edition)
Sold out
March 2023 (Second edition)
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About the publication
About the author
Shala Miller (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH) also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process. Taking up skin as a site of history and intimacy with the self and across generations, they hold space for the body’s vulnerabilities and maladies. Miller works across photography, film, writing, music, and performance as a means of meditating on the conjunction of desire, mourning, pain, and pleasure. Miller holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book, Tender Noted, was voted best photo book of 2022 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and her artwork is in the collections of MoMA, The Studio Museum of Harlem, the Hessel Museum, the Akeroyd Collection and The Lumber Room among others.
Praise
"The voices sitting in this skin are creating heat," writes Shala Miller in her far-reaching, full-bleed mourning song (and plays, and poems, and photographs), Tender Noted. She shies not from the flesh, scratching at the surface to discover what lies under archive and invention, needfully undivided. Fully embodied. "Time has not healed this wound so far," she says, sitting in the thick of heartbreak, curiously tending to its edges. Orbiting Tender Noted, I see the tonal influences of Charles Burnett’s The Killer of Sheep, and the voice and pen of Wanda Coleman, offering the blue note in text, image, quiet shrills and wails. "Writing future love poems to sing at my grave," Miller meets the many shapes of grief, wielding reverence and damning honesty in equal rite. This excavation requires a choir, a bouquet of crystalline, bubbling mouths and voices cast familiar, from family, neighbors, lovers, present and shifting aliases—when called on, we must step into the light and play our part.
—S*an D. Henry-Smith
Shala Miller’s chorus of plural selves dances across the pages of this slow, gorgeous collage. With a hand rendered unconscious by habit and also too familiarly self-conscious to bear, they scratch to soothe. The self-haunting throughout is rendered exactingly in one particular set of photographs: the artist’s lips and eyes, up close, seemingly projected against an invisible screen, against a darkened landscape, beneath an eclipsed light. Writing inside grooves, tucked next to scars, Miller offers something to hold onto.
—Yasmina Price
When I think of Shala, I think of her voice. I see her voice in the montage of these images and read cinema in the words. Looking through this book is like hearing Shala sing.
—Nicole Miller
Press
Philo Cohen, "Shala Miller, Tender Noted," Book Art Review (Spring 2023)
Re'al Christian, "Ten Best Art Books of 2022," The Brooklyn Rail, December 2022-January 2023
"ARTS ANNEX: Shala Miller, Tender Noted" on the Skylight Books Podcast Series, May 11, 2022
Museum of Modern Art, "Our Favorite Photobooks of 2022," MoMA Magazine, March 21, 2023
Megan N. Liberty, "Smaller Pleasures," Aperture (Winter 2024)