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Intimations: Intuitions beyond Subject
Everyone has had the experience of déjà vu, the feeling of seeing something that you could not previously have seen, of being somewhere you could not possibly have been, or experiencing something you really have not experienced. For most, it is a curious, slightly uncomfortable sensation that is quickly forgotten. For photographer Martin Miller, it is the source of an aesthetic, an inspirational but elusive "butterfly" that has the power to evoke strong visual responses from ordinary subjects. He likens the response to the physical phenomena of resonance in which favorable circumstances can magnify sounds or light. He suggests that it might be possible that certain forms and textures could be resonating with deep evolutionary experience encoded in our DNA, just as instinctive behavior is encoded in a manner that we cannot yet decipher. Such a mechanism would act outside our consciousness and normally be masked by the conscious meaning ordinarily associated with the subject. Regardless of how plausible one may regard such speculations, Miller's explorations of these evanescent experiences over the last fifty years have produced an extraordinary body of photographic art, created through the contemplative discipline imposed by large-format cameras and stunningly reproduced here using advanced stochastic half-toning for amazing detail and tonal subtleties.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 30, 2026
I did not expect this book to follow me after I closed it, but it did.
I picked up Intimations: Intuitions Beyond Subject out of curiosity. I stayed with it because it quietly rearranged how I see the world.
This is not a book you “consume.” It is a book you enter.
From the first pages, Martin Miller’s way of thinking about déjà vu, intuition, and visual memory felt unsettling in the best possible way. He is not chasing easy explanations. He is chasing something more fragile and more honest, that feeling when an image, a place, or a texture hits you before your brain can label it. That strange instant when recognition comes without a memory. I have felt that my whole life, but I never had language for it until now.
There were moments reading this where I had to stop and just sit. Miller’s idea that certain forms and visual patterns might be echoing something ancient inside us, something buried in DNA rather than memory, is both poetic and quietly terrifying. It suggests that part of us is always remembering something we have never lived. That we are responding not just as individuals, but as an entire lineage.
What makes this book so powerful is that it does not stay abstract. The photographs carry the philosophy in their bones. They are not flashy or loud. They are patient. They feel like they are waiting for you to notice what your eyes usually skip. Some of the images stirred something in me that was hard to describe, a sense of familiarity mixed with longing, like remembering a dream you never wrote down.
Miller’s use of large format photography and the incredible tonal detail makes every image feel intentional, almost reverent. You can sense the discipline behind them. These are not snapshots. They are meditations. Each one seems to ask a quiet question: Why does this feel important to you?
By the time I reached the end, I realized this book had done something rare. It made me more attentive. I started noticing light on walls, textures on sidewalks, the way shadows fall across ordinary objects. Things I had passed a thousand times suddenly felt charged with meaning, as if they were trying to speak.
This is a book about intuition, but it also becomes a book about slowing down, about trusting the strange, subtle responses we usually ignore. It invites you to believe that your quiet reactions to beauty, unease, or recognition are not accidents.
Intimations left me with the feeling that the world is deeper than it looks, and that we are deeper than we think. That maybe we are all walking through layers of memory we do not consciously remember, responding to echoes that go back farther than our own lives.
That is not a small thing for a book to do.
I will be coming back to this one. Not to reread it quickly, but to sit with it again, and let it whisper whatever it needs to say next.
I picked up Intimations: Intuitions Beyond Subject out of curiosity. I stayed with it because it quietly rearranged how I see the world.
This is not a book you “consume.” It is a book you enter.
From the first pages, Martin Miller’s way of thinking about déjà vu, intuition, and visual memory felt unsettling in the best possible way. He is not chasing easy explanations. He is chasing something more fragile and more honest, that feeling when an image, a place, or a texture hits you before your brain can label it. That strange instant when recognition comes without a memory. I have felt that my whole life, but I never had language for it until now.
There were moments reading this where I had to stop and just sit. Miller’s idea that certain forms and visual patterns might be echoing something ancient inside us, something buried in DNA rather than memory, is both poetic and quietly terrifying. It suggests that part of us is always remembering something we have never lived. That we are responding not just as individuals, but as an entire lineage.
What makes this book so powerful is that it does not stay abstract. The photographs carry the philosophy in their bones. They are not flashy or loud. They are patient. They feel like they are waiting for you to notice what your eyes usually skip. Some of the images stirred something in me that was hard to describe, a sense of familiarity mixed with longing, like remembering a dream you never wrote down.
Miller’s use of large format photography and the incredible tonal detail makes every image feel intentional, almost reverent. You can sense the discipline behind them. These are not snapshots. They are meditations. Each one seems to ask a quiet question: Why does this feel important to you?
By the time I reached the end, I realized this book had done something rare. It made me more attentive. I started noticing light on walls, textures on sidewalks, the way shadows fall across ordinary objects. Things I had passed a thousand times suddenly felt charged with meaning, as if they were trying to speak.
This is a book about intuition, but it also becomes a book about slowing down, about trusting the strange, subtle responses we usually ignore. It invites you to believe that your quiet reactions to beauty, unease, or recognition are not accidents.
Intimations left me with the feeling that the world is deeper than it looks, and that we are deeper than we think. That maybe we are all walking through layers of memory we do not consciously remember, responding to echoes that go back farther than our own lives.
That is not a small thing for a book to do.
I will be coming back to this one. Not to reread it quickly, but to sit with it again, and let it whisper whatever it needs to say next.
Displaying 1 of 1 review