Commercial photographer Sandro Miller makes a life out of portraits.

Muhammad Ali, Norman Schwarzkopf and Rev. Jesse Jackson are just a handful of the personalities internationally renowned photographer Sandro Miller has captured on film in the past 30 years.

But this Nikon Legend Behind the Lens, who also photographed a Nikon ad campaign featuring actor John Malkovich, maintains that shooting “the normal, real person” is still as fascinating to him as shooting any superstar—a claim that his work makes obvious. A portrait of an elderly woman in a fur stole and pearls, with her eyes barely cracked open at the camera, speaks volumes of her hard defiance and cynicism. Similarly, a photograph of an informally dressed elderly man holding a can of soda in a hotel lobby exudes a diffidence borne of modern life. These images attest to Miller’s sharp insight into the individual and his ability to capture a life’s narrative in one instant.

For this self-taught photo-grapher with a passion for portraiture, his inspiration all started with the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. “Seeing those images—I was just blown away,” he says. “At the age of 16, I knew that’s what I wanted to be—a photographer. I wanted to record people’s lives.”

So after finishing high school in Elgin, Illinois, where he grew up, Miller committed himself to learning the photography profession. He apprenticed with local photographer David Deahl, doing still-life photography and learning the trade. Unfortunately, Miller was not enthused. “[Still-life] didn’t move me at all,” he says. “I really struggled with inanimate objects and shooting food and product. There was nothing there that generated any energy or excitement for me.” But he stuck with it, and after five years of assisting, he had built an extensive portfolio, as well as a client and production list. At 24, he felt ready to open his own studio in Chicago.

With the aid of a partner, Miller was able to keep his overhead low, but still, the early years were tough. “I remember practically begging and stealing the first few years to keep the doors open,” he recalls. Miller shot products for Montgomery Ward, Spiegel and Sears, and although it took a while, he was eventually able to transition into the subject he really wanted to shoot: people. His first major personal project brought together two of his great passions: music and portraiture.

“I would go to the blues clubs of Chicago and ask the blues musicians if they’d come to my studio and let me take their pictures; then I’d give them the photos,” Miller says. He was drawn to these musicians as subjects, not only because of his own passion for the blues, but also because he felt they were “storytellers, not only in the words of their songs, but also in the lines of their faces, their eyes, their hands. There’s so much traveling and experiencing the world; you can see the maps on their faces.”

Miller shot these black-and-white portraits all through trial and error and instinct. Though he assisted for years, he had no formal training or technical education from any college or school.

If his early blues series was any sign, Miller had a flair for choosing colorful subjects—subjects who would draw viewers in, pique their curiosity, whet their appetite to know more. It was precisely this talent for finding such personalities that would earn him his
first big break.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Miller embarked on a personal portrait series of American bikers. He traveled around the country in pursuit of them, taking their pictures along the way. Eventually, the work caught the attention of Tina Brown at The New Yorker, who picked eight of these images and ran a story in the magazine about the bikers.

For a literary magazine not known at the time for its photography, Brown’s decision was risky, especially because one of the photographs she’d chosen for a double-page spread showed a biker giving the finger to the camera. “She received a lot of flack for running this image, but it was very, very strong,” Miller says. “You couldn’t forget it.”

The biker series brought Miller’s early dream full circle. After Richard Avedon, Miller was only the second photographer to have his photos published in a photo essay in The New Yorker.

In 1994, Miller got another career-molding opportunity. He was asked by an ad agency to shoot portraits of Michael Jordan while the basketball star was in Chicago shooting a TV commercial. Miller had three and a half minutes to shoot his subject, at the mercy of an unsympathetic TV director. Thankfully, Miller had done seven hours of prep work before the shoot, readying lighting for Jordan with a stand-in who was of similar build and skin tone. When Jordan came in, Miller wasted no time in getting the most out of what he was given. He shot 72 portraits.

Despite the extreme time limitations, the shoot ended up being one of Miller’s most successful. Miller says that Jordan “went through all the emotions—from laughing to crying to excitement.” The portraits were also unique because they were solely of Jordan, not of Jordan with a product. Miller’s images of the basketball star were used for magazine covers and ads all over the world. In 1995, HarperCollins asked Miller to use eight to ten of the portraits for Jordan’s book, I Can’t Accept Not Trying, which went on to sell 1.4 million copies.

Since then, Miller has completed five additional books, two of which are already in print and another three that are forthcoming: American Biker, featuring his early biker portraits; Sandro Verona: Figure E Rittrati, a catalogue from the Scavi Scaligeri exhibition; Blood Brothers, which documents boxing around the world; Matador, portraits of the legendary matador Joselito of Spain; and Nudes on Plexi, a series of nudes splayed against plexiglass and shot from beneath. He is also working on a project in Cuba, documenting the degeneration of Havana City.

Now with decades of experience under his belt, Miller has learned that no matter how big the project, or famous the subject, the same philosophy applies: “[A photographer] needs to be a chameleon to relate to everyone,” he says. “I document the people in front of me in a way that is physical, invasive—I am physically very near to them because that allows me to get close to who they are.”

© 2007 All photos copyright Sandro Miller, All rights reserved.