Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich—Homage to Photographic Masters

In the late fall of 2012, Sandro Miller was facing stage four cancer. And as one does in such times, he began to consider his life—who he was as a father and as a husband, but also as a photographer.

He looked back on a thirty-eight year career that began with an Irving Penn portrait at age sixteen. Self-taught through an obsessive absorption of over eight hundred photography books, Miller has gone on to work with some of the biggest advertising clients in the game—creating iconic commercial imagery for Samsung, Dove, Tide, Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson, Reebok, Motorola, NBC, the American Cancer Society, and many more. His personal work has been featured in exhibitions at some of the world’s most esteemed galleries, and has been awarded dozens of the industry’s top awards.

“I felt I had achieved more than I ever thought possible,” said Miller. And still, something felt unfinished. He kept thinking about the ways truly great photographs had moved him—how he would have never come so far without the inspiration such art provoked. “Days would pass during my recovery, and I would think, ‘Would I ever take another great picture? Would I ever get the chance to create another iconic image that might bring future young photographers to feel the way I do about Sasse, Newman, Karsh, Lange, Korda, Watson, or Skrebneski?’”

Such meditations fueled the conception of a project that would reach inconceivable proportions, an homage collection that would perfectly reconstruct the work of Miller’s idols. Before he could begin, though, Miller knew that he’d need a single, perfect, model. And he knew exactly the guy.

“I knew that there wasn’t anybody else out there that I felt could transform himself, chameleon-like, into a man, woman, king, dictator, poor woman, Hemingway. Whatever it was I asked of him, I knew John Malkovich would be able to transform himself and get there.”

Miller had been collaborating with the critically acclaimed actor for almost two decades already. When he brought the idea to him at his home in the south of France—thirty photos in hand—Malkovich agreed that if they pulled it off, they’d have created something very special indeed. But it would have to be perfect.

“John understood that it was not something that I wanted to make people laugh about, or laugh at,” he said. “When people really do see John playing a very sexy, sensitive beautiful Marilyn Monroe, I didn’t want them to take a look at it and giggle. I wanted them to look at the shot and say, ‘He nailed it.’”

Over the course of two separate sessions—one in 2014, one in 2017—the photographer and the actor created over sixty recreations of some of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, all with various metamorphoses of John Malkovich’s barely recognizable face.

“It was truly about going back and trying to get in the heads of these photographers, dissecting what they were doing at that moment, what was going on, the emotion they were trying to draw out of their subject, where the light was coming from, and why they chose the camera that they chose to shoot … even trying to think of what the atmosphere was like,” said Miller. “Say, for example, in that bedroom when Burt Stern was shooting Marilyn Monroe for that last sitting. I’ve looked at those shots for years and years, and truly gotten deep into thought about exactly what went on that evening. How Burt approached that—or how Irving Penn approached Picasso and took that magnificent portrait of him looking underneath the brim of his hat, over the collar of that beautiful embroidered jacket. I look at it and wonder—where were those two at as that photograph happened? How did it happen?”

The results are mesmerizing in their layers—a virtuosic demonstration of Miller’s talent, range, and ambition; a journey through the mastery of Malkovich’s abilities to transform; and an overwhelming tribute to the art of photography in its most powerful iterations.

The collection in its entirety, titled Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters, will make its first North American appearance in an exhibition at New Orleans’ Mac-Gryder Gallery, which will open with an artist’s reception during the citywide annual Art for Art’s Sake event on October 5, 2019.

“This exhibit makes you do a double take,” said gallery owner Jill McGaughey. “It’s a jolt to your brain. You’ve seen these iconic images throughout history, but seeing them recreated in this way brings you to see them with fresh eyes. The level of detail is staggering.”

For Miller, the show is—first—a way to say thank you to these great photographers for the ways they’ve impacted his life and his work. “It’s a chance to truly pay homage back to them,” he said. “But it’s also something that I want people to rediscover. I want the viewer to rediscover these old images, and really feel how profoundly these shots have contributed to the photography world, to society.”

Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters will be on display at the Mac-Gryder Gallery until January 2020. See more of Miller’s work at sandrofilm.com.