Sandro Miller & Mark Edward Harris
Sandro Miller, a fine art and commercial photographer, was born in Elgin, Illinois in 1958, and currently lives and works in Chicago. He has authored fifteen books and has exhibited his work worldwide.
His photography has been featured in international advertising campaigns for major corporations, as well as in editorial work published globally. In 2011, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, he won the Saatchi & Saatchi Best New Director Award for his short video "Butterflies," starring John Malkovich. In November 2014, the Lucie Foundation awarded him the International Photographer of the Year Award at Carnegie Hall for his contributions to photography. Sandro Miller's work explores the boundaries of portraiture in both commercial and fine art photography. He uses the name "Sandro" in his professional career and focuses on capturing the body's posture and expression to reveal his subjects' inner selves. In his solo work, Sandro's emotional impact is even more powerful, as his subjects' faces and bodies dominate his compositions, leaving little room for distractions. John Malkovich is Sandro's most prolific muse and model, and together they worked on a project called "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich," in which Sandro recreated some of the most famous images in photographic history, with Malkovich as the main subject. Sandro pays tribute to his idols, from Dorothea Lange to Irving Penn to Andy Warhol, through his adaptations of their most prominent works.
Assignments have taken Los Angeles and Tokyo-based photographer Mark Edward Harris to more than 100 countries and all seven continents. His editorial work has appeared in publications such as Vanity Fair, LIFE, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine,
GEO, Newsweek, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler,
AFAR, Wallpaper, Vogue, Architectural Digest,
The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The London Sunday Times Travel Magazine as well as all the major photography and in-flight magazines.
Among his numerous accolades are CLIO, ACE, Impact DOCS Award of Excellence, Aurora Gold, and IPA awards.
His books include Faces of the Twentieth Century: Master Photographers and Their Work, The Way of the Japanese Bath, Wanderlust, North Korea, South Korea, Inside Iran, The Travel Photo Essay: Describing
A Journey Through Images, and his latest, The People of the Forest, a book about orangutans.
For the three-city travel photography workshop, studio lighting gave way to students looking for cityscapes and environmental and "eyes are the window to the soul" portraits. While all three benefit from the warm, angled light at the edges of the day, Harris and Miller demonstrated how to take advantage of open shade for portraits, utilizing spaces just out of the reach of direct sunlight during the middle hours of the day. Techniques including the use of small Westcott reflectors, Stella lights, and off-camera fill flash with Rogue Magnetic Modifiers with gels to match the existing ambient light kelvin temperatures expanded the students' understanding of how to harness light when working out of a single camera bag. Participants were encouraged by Harris and Miller to use shorter lenses and engage with their chosen subjects rather than hiding behind a long lens. While students came armed with Leicas, Canons, Fujifilm, Sony, and Nikon cameras, the instructors stressed that it's the eye behind the lens that is responsible for producing meaningful imagery.
After several days exploring Mumbai, the travel photography workshop headed to Varanasi, an ethereal city on the Ganges River that seems to be arrested in time. In 1897, Mark Twain wrote about Varanasi using its former British colonial name: "Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." It is indeed one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. The confluence of religions in Varanasi is one of its most fascinating aspects and one the photo group focused on.
For centuries, it's been a place of pilgrimage and cremations along the sacred Ganges for Hindus. Nearby Sarnath is said to be where the Buddha's first sermon took place in the fifth century BCE. The city has a long tradition of Muslim artisanship that the group documented on a special tour arranged to photograph in several textile mills.
Being based at the magnificent Brijrama Palace gave workshop participants the opportunity to venture out on their own along the Ganges between excursions.