JOHN MILLER, The Middle of the Day, Volume 4, Museum im Bellpark / Walther König, 2018

Published by Museum im Bellpark, Kriens / Cabinet d'arts graphiques, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva / Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, in 2018, The Middle of the Day, Volume 4: I Don't Have a Social Life, Nobody Ever Invites Me to Go Anywhere, and Nobody Ever Drops by to Visit or Hang Out is the fourth instalment of John Miller's ongoing photographic series begun in 1994. ISBN 978-3-96098-489-4.

The series is governed by a single condition: every photograph is taken between noon and 2 pm. Miller originally chose the period because it was his least favourite time of day. The resulting archive has no consistent visual subject — streets, objects, interiors and strangers connected only by an invisible temporal coordinate. The photograph cannot prove the condition that qualifies it for inclusion.

Published for Miller's 2018–19 exhibition Comedy of Manners at Museum im Bellpark, Volume Four returns to the series fourteen years after the third publication and contains twenty recent colour photographs. By then, the status of casual photography had radically changed: disposable images had become embedded within ordinary social communication. The project therefore operates less as documentation of particular places than as a system for assigning significance. The image remains ordinary. The rule changes its status.