Elk in the Room
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photographer Craig Miller
The elk does not knock. It simply arrives — on your deck, in your rose garden, at the pay phone on the corner you forgot was still there. It walks across the Wells Fargo parking lot with the unhurried confidence of someone who has somewhere to be, pauses at a bird feeder with the focused attention of a connoisseur, and ducks beneath a volleyball net with a grace that has no particular interest in being appreciated. The cars lined up behind it on the road can wait.
This is Payson — or rather, this is what Payson actually is, beneath the assumption that town and wilderness occupy separate territories with a clearly posted boundary between them. That boundary, if it ever existed, dissolved long ago. Payson grew up inside elk habitat, not on its edge. The elk were here first, and they have not forgotten it.
Photographer Craig Miller has spent 15 years documenting what happens when that fact reasserts itself. Going out once or twice a day, every day, he has built a body of work that moves through registers most wildlife photography never attempts: the slapstick of a young girl slowly registering that an elk has joined her volleyball game, the odd tenderness of a massive animal delicately licking a pink rose, the quietly surreal image of an elk standing at a pay phone — two things the modern world has largely moved on from, occupying the same frame as if to confer on the matter.
Miller doesn’t engineer these moments. He finds them. “With the elk, it’s mostly opportunistic,” he says. “They just happen to be near something you’d expect to find humans or other animals around.” But opportunism, practiced daily with enough patience and attention, eventually looks a lot like vision.
The elk in this collection are not lost. They are not confused. They are not wandering into foreign territory with wide, frightened eyes. They are, by every available measure, at home — locking antlers on a high school football field, investigating the geometry of a chain-link fence, grazing their way through neighborhoods where some residents set out bird feeders and others, Miller notes, are less charmed. “Some of us love the elk,” he says. “Some find them a nuisance — don’t like them eating their prize rose bushes, coming into their garages or tipping over their garbage cans.”
The elk, for their part, seem unbothered by the distinction.
Meet the Photographer
Craig Miller grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where wildlife and urban infrastructure kept a more conventional distance from each other. After earning degrees from Aurora University in social work, physical education and education, he built a career as a public school teacher and counselor. In 2002, he and his wife, Ann, relocated to Payson for semi-retirement and the mountain air.
The elk came with the territory.
Miller had been a hobbyist photographer since childhood, but it was in Payson, about 15 years ago, that the practice became something more serious — a daily commitment, pursued once or twice a day, every day. He teaches advanced photography at Eastern Arizona College and, with Ann, operates one of Payson’s most decorated small businesses: a combined photography and disc jockey service that has been voted the town’s best in both categories by Payson Roundup readers for 14 consecutive years. The work moves between art forms, but the instinct is the same in each — attentiveness to what the moment is actually offering.
His photography has appeared in books, magazines, newspapers and calendars, and on the walls of homes and businesses throughout the region. His first Images Arizona feature, “Advent of Antlers,” was published in December 2020. This is his second.
He still goes out every day. As for what he hopes people take away from these particular images, Miller doesn’t overthink it. “Just a smile,” he says, “and a ‘Hey, Mary, you’ve got to see this picture DJ Craig posted today.’”
Payson’s elk, for their part, continue to provide the material — on the football field, in the rose garden, at the pay phone, wherever they happen to be.