Deer Camp: Last Light in the Northeast Kingdom

Honorable Mention, 1992 Golden Light Book Awards sponsored by the Maine Photographic Workshops.

Neither advocacy nor indictment of deer hunting, Deer Camp documents the rituals and traditions of hunting season in Vermont's fabled Northeast Kingdom, a landscape increasingly threatened by development and changing social values. John Miller's text and photographs capture the culture of hunting and its place in country life. The cabins, the hunters and their families, and hunting artifacts and memorabilia are evocatively chronicled.

The sixty black-and-white photographs record with unsentimental honesty the multigenerational ritual of deer camp, showing the camps themselves (ranging from converted school buses with stovepipes sticking out the roofs to comfortable second homes in the woods), the pickups and jalopies, hand-drawn maps and hand-carved furniture, polished snowshoes, inlaid rifles, smoking camp stoves, and snowy woodpiles.

Miller's text details - among much else - the methodology of the hunt, woods lore and recipes, and the basics of camp life and ritual. Especially moving are the oral histories he includes along with the narrative which reveal the complicated richness of the hunter's world: its hardness, its camaraderie, its passion, and its underlying respect and reverence for the woods and the deer.

Copublished with the Vermont Folklife Center