Moose was worried.
Bill “Moose” Skowron was one of the greatest baseball players of his time. A Chicago native and 16-inch softball legend, he played for years on the New York Yankees (28 home runs in 1961) and was best pals with Mickey Mantle. He came to the White Sox for a while to play and had been retired and working in community relations for that team when I met him in 2000.
That year, he and I were on our way to photographer Sandro Miller’s studio on the Near West Side. Moose was uneasy because, almost inconceivably, he had never sat for a formal portrait before preparing to do so for a story I was writing.
“What kind of person takes the picture?” Moose asked. “Am I dressed OK?”
He told me that his wife, Virginia, had urged him to wear a conservative outfit of white shirt, dark tie, sport coat and slacks. The meeting and the photo session started awkwardly, but eventually Miller won Moose over, and the ballplayer allowed the photographer’s assistants to apply makeup, get him to change into a black turtleneck sweater and to pose in various ways (including biting down on a baseball) that made for many striking images.
“Good guy, Sandro,” said Moose on the way back to his suburban home. “Hope he’s good at taking pictures.”
This memory came rushing back when I opened a remarkable new book, “On Earth as It Is Not in Heaven” (Skira Press), 276 pages filled with 229 photos and some words from a small gathering of the voices of photography experts David Campany, Phillip Prodger, Anne Morin and Alan Cohen, former Chicago journalist and prize winning poet Patricia Smith and some guy named John Malkovich.
Sandro Miller’s photos explode across the pages, like some visual fireworks display, holding the eyes and intriguing the mind and, often, grabbing the heart.
The book answers Skowron’s old question with a resounding, profound “Yes.”
Yes, Sandro Miller is good at taking pictures, extraordinarily good.
He has taken thousands of them over the last half century, ever since growing up in Elgin, remembering being a 5-year-old, the eldest to three children, and learning that his father had been killed in an auto accident. He writes of that and of his first experience with cameras and the amazing journey that followed, a trip that he still sees as his salvation. He writes that the book “is my tribute to humankind from birth to death. These portraits were not made for me, and they were not made for my sitter, the portraits were created for you, the viewer.”
He has shot for hundreds of national advertising campaigns for clients such as American Express, BMW, Pepsi, Nikon, Microsoft, Nike and the U.S. Army. He has had solo shows here and in Germany and Italy, and his editorial work has been featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Time, Forbes, ESPN Magazine and the Tribune.
“On Earth as It Is Not in Heaven” is his 16th book. Previously, he traveled to Cuba and produced “Imagine Cuba, 1999-2007,” published in 2009. There were many Cuban boxers in the book, some famous in pugilistic circles. There are also wrestlers, volleyball players, and swimmers. But Miller was obviously also grabbed by the less acclaimed or physically chiseled folks, those he calls “the people of Cuba on the streets (who) filled a void in my soul, a void that felt empty with loss” after his father’s death.
He brings dignity and humanity to so-called ordinary people in the book, as he does often and powerfully.
A very different book came in 2012. It was “Sandro: Raw: Steppenwolf,” a massive, 234-page book with many photos and a few words that weighed about 15 pounds. As I wrote then, “If you think you know the members of the Steppenwolf ensemble from their stage, TV and film work … seeing them through Miller’s lens will etch them in your mind in new and vibrant ways.”
It came about as another form of salvation when Miller was diagnosed with stage 4 throat and neck cancer. He told me, “I knew I was in for an arduous eight-month journey. I knew that the treatments would make it impossible for me to work with clients. I knew that I needed something to help me heal.”
So, he dove into his files and found thousands of photos he had taken for Steppenwolf over the previous 14 years, since he was first hired to shoot actors’ portraits for use in posters, playbills and advertisements.
“In dusting off the old negatives, I remembered what amazing things took place in the studio after we did what we needed to do,” he said. “Over the years, I have gotten to know many of them well, and there is a level of trust we have cultivated.”
His most intense photographer-subject relationship has been and remains John Malkovich. The two have collaborated on such books as “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters,” “Malkovich Sessions,” and “Malkovich: Then Came John.” In these, Malkovich is photographed dressed as such famous stars as Bette Davis and Orson Welles, and also recreates famous photos. He’s got a few shots in this new book, in which he writes that Miller “is a fantastic colleague and friend, a great storyteller and a wonderfully gifted seeker and finder of truths.”
“On Earth as It Is Not in Heaven” is being formally published this week, with a book signing event at his studio for friends and family, including his wife, filmmaker Claudie-Aline Miller and two adult children, Nathan and Natalia.
As far as I know, he will continue taking pictures, and that’s good. “Moose” Skowron died in 2012, but it’s my understanding that he kept in his living room a framed photo of himself that Miller had sent him after their 2000 photo shoot. And now, having spent time with Miller’s work again, I realized how much of my life and career has been spent in the company of photographers. I have known famous ones — Art Shay, Victor Skrebneski, Steve Schapiro, Jack Lane and more. And there have been all the years in the company of the Tribune’s Charles Osgood and many other great newspaper photographers.
And yet, I remain blissfully ignorant of their art. Matters such as lighting and composition are foreign to me. But the results so often amaze me, as they do in this new book, that what they do seems like magic.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
