Edited: Helen Frajman.

Nathan Miller travelled to the Mississippi Delta in search of the cradle of the Blues and describes his project as the “visual notes of a traveller with a camera passing through”. In these evocative black and white photographs he builds a broad cultural landscape taking in legendary bluesmen Big Jack Johnson, T-Model Ford and drummer Sam Carr relaxing and playing in juke joints and clubs such as “Ground Zero” and “Reds” in Clarksdale, as well as barbershops, Sunday church gatherings, roadside memorials and the surrounding countryside with its landscape at once redolent of the past and marked by the excesses of the twenty first century.

“Perhaps what is so striking about these images is their freshness. This is what he came to see and it is almost as though he is surprised to have found it. So surprised – and delighted even that he documented his experience as a validation of sorts. Almost a “aha” moment of “Yes, the blues is real”. Introduction: Shelley Ritter, Director of the Delta Blues Museum, Mississippi.