Sixty Years Of Woman's Photos Of Walla Walla's Faces Go On Sale

WALLA WALLA - For nearly six decades, Jay Miller photographed the faces of the Walla Walla Valley.

Young men in uniform. Girls in prom dresses. Graduations, weddings, baby pictures, Happy Canyon princesses, family portraits.

Hundreds of photos line the walls of the old Miller Studio downtown. The passage of years is chronicled in style changes - with Shirley Temple ringlets giving way to bouffants, polyester and jump suits.

Miller worked until a few months before her death in 1994 at age 85. This month, her family is selling photos from the former studio to benefit the DeSales Booster Club.

It's a fitting memorial for a woman who shot graduation pictures from Athena to Dayton and faithfully followed high-school sports.

"She really was an institution in this valley," said her great-niece, Laura Rea.

Julia "Jay" Miller met her future husband, Frank Miller, while she was working in a department store in Walla Walla in the mid-1930s. She went to work at his studio and later married him. Photography was his passion, and it became hers as well.

After her husband's death in 1961, Jay Miller took over the studio with the help of her sister, Dee Baffney.

"Jay's life was centered around that studio," said her great-nephew, Tom Baffney. "She never had children."

Miller worked 16-hour days at the studio, a 17-room cavern on Main Street. A short woman who added height with sling-backed pumps, she loved to gossip and never hesitated to say what was on her mind.

"Suck it in," she'd order clients.

"Kid, I don't like that haircut."

"Turn that way. There. I just took 20 pounds off of you."

"She had no tact, really," Rea said.

But Miller had an eye for what looked good on people, and her photos captured their best features.

"Brides would line her up before they reserved the church or the reception hall," Rea said.

Miller also had a comical flair. She coaxed smiles out of bashful grooms by winking, making eyes and even hiking up her skirt. Just as the smile came, she'd snap the picture.

Nicknames were her specialty, concocted with typical bluntness. If she called you "Loverboy," the name stuck throughout the photo session.

Miller took Pat Locati's high-school graduation pictures in 1957, her wedding portrait and, 30 years later, wedding pictures for two of Locati's daughters.

Miller was a perfectionist, often stopping to adjust a pleat or change the tilt of a head. "She could see the tiniest little thing. Her pictures were the best," Locati said.

Locati and three of her daughters cared for Miller at Park Manor Rehabilitation Center before her death. Even then, she was full of vigor.

"Girl, I've got to get out of here," she'd tell Locati. "I've got a wedding to photograph."