Dance for Life Exhibition: Photography by Sandro
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One of Chicago’s top commercial photographers, Miller has also begun to develop a reputation in recent years as a serious artist. This past year Catherine Edelman handpicked ten of his photos for the Chicago Project, an online gallery she created to introduce local photographers to a wider audience, and this week he’ll have his first solo gallery show in Chicago.
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Miller, who grew up in Elgin, was expected to go into the family business building homes. But as a teen in the mid-70s he walked into a drugstore and bought a magazine that changed his life. He’s long since forgotten what it was about the cover of American Photo that caught his eye–“There was probably a beautiful girl on the cover, scantily clad,” he says–but inside was a series of portraits by Irving Penn from the late 50s and early 60s. “They were striking,” Miller says. “Powerful. Bigger than life. I remember the incredible use of light and shadow–I’d never seen people portrayed like that before.”
He quit junior college after one year and following a brief stint as a suburban photographer’s assistant wormed his way into David Deahl’s studio, promising, he recalls, to do whatever was needed–even to clean the photographer’s bathroom. Over two and a half years as Deahl’s assistant, Miller became comfortable with the technical aspects of photography, and it wasn’t long before he was working on his own portfolio, recruiting blues musicians like Buddy Guy and Junior Wells to sit for him in exchange for free prints. “I was reaching for something extraordinary,” he says. “Whether it was the joys of playing or the hardships of their pasts, I wanted to bring out emotion.” He lit the photos in a way that maximized fine detail. “I wanted the viewer to see the lines in their faces, the wrinkles in their fingers, every pore, hair, eyelash,” he says. “The little details tell the story.”
“I twitched, my finger hit the shutter, and we were done,” says Miller. “I didn’t want to find out if he was joking.”
Miller returned to the studio for other book projects. He shot one called Atropa with a 1950s Polaroid camera that gave him the antique look he was after. His subjects, all nudes, look like weathered sculptures–partly a result of his distressing the negatives, processing them for days rather than minutes.
