This Photographer Learned His Craft by Collecting – Now Collectors Buy His Books

You may not immediately recognize the name Sandro Miller, but chances are you’ve already encountered his work. The acclaimed American photographer has built a career spanning high-end commercial imagery and is best known for his personal projects, most notably his long-running collaboration with actor John Malkovich. When I meet him at Annabel’s in Mayfair, he … 

You may not immediately recognize the name Sandro Miller, but chances are you’ve already encountered his work. The acclaimed American photographer has built a career spanning high-end commercial imagery and is best known for his personal projects, most notably his long-running collaboration with actor John Malkovich.

When I meet him at Annabel’s in Mayfair, he is with Malkovich, the two of them reflecting on Then Came John – a 300-limited-run collectible photobook which took 30 years to complete. Unlike anything else on the market, it’s packaged with a built-in video screen and has a price tag of €5,000. 

Although it may be the most coveted, it’s not the first monograph that Miller has created. Over the course of his career, he has produced 18 in total – a number he admits is driven, at least in part, by “a fear of not being remembered.” It’s a striking thing to say so plainly, especially to a stranger. But Miller has little interest in polishing the edges off his motivations. “The fact that you have a book solidifies you in this world,” he tells me. “Books can go on and live hundreds of years past our transition.” 

He has been amassing photobooks – a personal library now numbering more than 2,000 – for most of his life. “When I decided to become a photographer at 16 years old, I knew that the only way that I was going to be able to learn was through books.” 

Growing up, he recalls a childhood shaped by absence and improvisation. His father was killed in an automobile accident when he was four. His mother, an Italian immigrant, raised three children on almost nothing, and education beyond high school was never really on the table. “I wasn’t going to have a mentor or a teacher. So I used books to help me understand the philosophy behind photography: composition, lighting, everything came from the books that I collected over the years.”

And he studied all of them – the brilliant ones, the mediocre ones, the disappointing ones. In fact, he insists the “bad” books mattered most. They were useful for sharpening his judgment. “Mediocracy just wasn’t option for me.”

Some of the most “precious” books in his collection are signed works by photographers he still speaks about with devotional reverence: Irving Penn and Richard Avedon among them, artists he placed “on a pedestal” long before he ever imagined becoming their contemporary.

But Miller’s relationship with collecting began long before photography entered the picture. As a child, he collected baseball cards obsessively – “probably over 10,000,” he recalls – back when he imagined becoming a professional baseball player rather than a photographer. 

See also: Why the Next Great Collectibles May Be Fashion, Fossils, and Fractional Shares

Then came coins: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. A neighbor, whom he describes as a kind of surrogate father figure, introduced him to collecting them through small coin folders organized meticulously by date and type. “I never could become a serious collector then, because I never really had the money to buy serious coins,” he says. “But for me, it gave me discipline.”

That word – discipline – comes up repeatedly when he talks about collecting. Because collecting demands patience, in waiting for the right object, and restraint, in not buying impulsively. “When you collect, it also shows that you are passionate about something, and that you want to learn more about it,” he explains. “So when you collect, you’re always growing your knowledge.” 

It is this idea – collecting as a form of self-education – that seems to have underpinned his entire career and will go on to shape his legacy. “Each book that I put out gave me a bit more reassurance that I will continue, hopefully to live on for many, many years,” he says. “As a photographer, I do the work to pass it on to a new generation, to influence and inspire them.”

The people who buy those books, he believes, are not simply purchasing photography. They are buying into feeling, into obsession, into the intensity of the work itself. “They are people who love art and the idea of my recreations,” he says. “They find them extremely powerful or gratifying or even humorous.”

“If my portraits are not moving you in some way,” he adds, “if you aren’t feeling confusion or angst, anxiety, empathy, compassion, love or hatred, then I haven’t done my job.”