Photographer Peter Miller once traveled the world for periodicals‎ ranging from Smithsonian to Sports Illustrated. But the Waterbury, Vt., resident, seeing professional cameras give way to personal cellphones, struggled to make ends meet this past decade upon turning 80.

“I was thinking of leaving Vermont to live in a less-expensive state, but many emailed me and said I couldn’t because I am … a Vermont treasure?” he wrote inquisitively in a 2016 commentary. “I thought about that, and in a way it is true. My calling is to document the culture of Vermont.”

And so the old-timer learned some new tricks. Logging onto the internet, the self-described “nonviolent anarchist” launched a crowdsourcing campaign that raised enough money to self-publish his sixth book, “Vanishing Vermonters: Loss of a Rural Culture.”

“My people, I call them, seem to have been priced out of our state,” he wrote in the foreword, “as taxes and the cost of energy escalated and real-estate prices soared.”

Miller’s latest title would be his last. A vanishing Vermonter himself, the 89-year-old black-and-white photographer died Monday at Morrisville’s Copley Hospital, his family confirmed without elaborating.

“His consistent approach to producing authentic depictions of the Vermont way of life is unparalleled,” former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said of Miller in a 2013 congressional floor speech. “He gives a face, and a voice, to Vermonters.”

Born Jan. 6, 1934, in New York City, Miller moved to the Green Mountain State at age 13 before buying his first camera at age 16.

“I have no idea why,” he once told this reporter about the purchase.

Miller nonetheless focused his lens on retired Weston, Vt., farmers Will and Rowena Austin, not realizing the resulting photo would grace the cover of his 1990 book “Vermont People” as well as a sign advertising his longtime Route 100 home and gallery in the Waterbury hamlet of Colbyville.

Moving on to the University of Toronto, Miller met Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, best known for his 1941 “Roaring Lion” portrait of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The Vermonter assisted Karsh on shoots with the likes of French philosopher Albert Camus and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso — “arrogant and wanted to control the sitting,” Miller said of the latter artist — to discover the master’s secret.

“Forget about the camera,” he learned. “Talk to the people.”

Miller did that as a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer in Paris, then a Life magazine reporter in New York from 1959 until returning to the Green Mountains five years later to freelance for a variety of national publications.

Most longtime Vermonters recognize Miller for his iconic image of the late Tunbridge farmer turned “Man With a Plan” film star Fred Tuttle holding a picture of his father holding a picture of his father.

“I set up my tripod and … 120 years of Tuttles in the same photograph,” Miller said of the shot.

But when Miller approached more than a dozen publishers in hopes of releasing his first book in the 1980s, all dismissed his proposed collection of black-and-white “Vermont People” photos as a Works Progress Administration project a half-century too late.

“They said there wasn’t any color,” he recalled, “and it was too regional.”

Publishing the book himself in 1990, Miller sold out his first 3,000 copies in six weeks and an additional 12,000 since, spurring follow-up titles including “Vermont Farm Women” and “A Lifetime of Vermont People.”

Miller’s fortunes changed with the new millennium. Turning 80 in 2014, he pivoted from camerawork to commentaries as he turned his house into an Airbnb and tapped his local food shelf.

“It is tough all over for creative people,” he wrote in an essay for VTDigger. “New business models created by CEOs with the expectations that every intellectual property is as free as the internet has crippled the photography, illustration, writing and music creators.”

Miller would not go gentle into that good night. Self-publishing his 168-page “Vanishing Vermonters” book in 2017, he shared the stories of more than two dozen portrait subjects.

Take Clem Despault, a fellow octogenarian and used-car salesman, salvage yard operator and stock-car racer just down the road.

“Them Motor Vehicle people got this new car-inspection system,” Despault is quoted as saying of a program that can mandate expensive repairs. “I got people who can’t afford to hardly live, and they need a car just to drive a couple of miles to work or to buy food. This is a rural state, we’re poor and everyone’s got to drive; don’t they know that for God’s sake?”

Miller photographed both “people who are really upset and people who’ve had to reinvent themselves.” He was both, selling his work on a website from his 160-year-old farmhouse before moving to a senior apartment in Stowe, Vt., last fall.

“They keep saying they’re going to raise taxes again because we need a doggie park, we need a hockey rink, we need, we need …” he lamented. “I have to stand up for my people — me included.”

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