If you haven’t seen photographer Sandro Miller’s portrait series “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters,” you haven’t been spending much time online. Miller’s recreation of famous portraits, featuring actor John Malkovich as Yousuf Karsh’s Ernest Hemingway, Alberto Korda’s Che Guevara, Bert Stern’s Marilyn Monroe, Philippe Halsman’s Salvador Dalí and other iconic figures, became one of the biggest viral photo stories of the past year. “They were everywhere!” Miller says of his images.

And that was great, until it wasn’t.

In the age of digital connectedness, when the intrinsic worth of everything from fine art to Nutella desert recipes is quantified by the number of likes they receive on Facebook, becoming an Internet sensation  is commonly considered a good thing. But there can also be a price to be paid for such cultural conspicuousness.

Two days from now, on Feb. 12, Miller’s Malkovich portrait series will go on view at the prestigious Fahey/Klein Gallery  in Los Angeles. For the Chicago-based photographer, the exhibition represents a dream fulfilled. “For about 15 years I’ve wanted to show my work at Fahey/Klein, and I felt that this project was finally the right work for the gallery,” Miller says. But, he adds, the gallery’s owner, David Fahey, wasn’t so sure, at least at first.

Miller approached Fahey about the idea of an exhibition in December, at the Art Basel Miami art fair. “I think at the time David might have thought the work was slightly overexposed,” he says. “And frankly, the images don’t have the kind of power online that they do in person."

Miller says Fahey had to see the prints in person to understand what the project was really about—that behind the amusing concept there was an utter lack of irony and an absolute conviction in the transformative power of photography. "I could see in his eyes that he got it,” Miller recalls.

Artist and Muse

The portrait series is just the latest collaboration in a remarkably fruitful creative relationship  between the photographer and the actor. Miller, whose career goes back nearly 40 years, first met Malkovich in the mid-1990s, when he was shooting a portrait project for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company. Malkovich admired the black-and-white images Miller had made, and the pair struck up a friendship. About a year later, they traveled to Croatia to create a memorable Nikon-sponsored portrait series.

“By the time we were done in Croatia, our relationship was pretty locked,” Miller says. They went on to create a number of other projects—some of which, Miller has noted previously, have been “pretty absurd, risky, and downright freakish.” That includes a short video  in which Malkovich portrayed a drugged-out fiend talking to himself in the bathroom of a raunchy nightclub. The piece was named a winner of the International Motion Art Awards in 2013.

Then, three years ago, Miller was diagnosed with a stage-four cancer. “It was one of those life-changing moments where you don’t know if you’re going to make it,” he says. “When you have that moment, you start thinking of the things that really matter to you. And for me what mattered was this lifelong love of mine for photography.”

Growing up in near Chicago in Elgin, Illinois, the son of a single mother, photography was not part of Miller’s life. “By most standards we would be considered poor, and art was not what we talked about,” he says. But at age 16, while paging through a photography magazine, he saw Irving Penn’s 1957 portrait of Pablo Picasso.  “It was like, ‘Bam!’ This is what I want to do. I didn’t even know who Picasso was, but Penn’s photograph made me want to know. I wanted to make images that powerful.”

As he recovered his strength from the illness, Miller began thinking about paying homage to the Picasso portrait—and the many other photographs that, he says, had changed his life—through a series of recreations. The notion came together the next time Malkovich was in his studio. “I thought he looked a little like Truman Capote,” Miller says. And that made him think of Penn’s famous 1948 “corner” portrait  of the writer.

Before approaching Malkovich with his idea, Miller tested the concept, sending out his team of stylists and set builders to see if he could successfully duplicate the Capote image. Pleased with the result, he began making a list of other portraits he wanted to recreate. Then he emailed Malkovich and said he needed to speak with him—which he soon did, over a bottle of wine at the actor’s home in the south of France.

“I told him, ‘I want to transform you into each one of these characters,’ and you could see him thinking about it,” Miller recalls. “He’s a theater guy, and he was thinking, ‘What, me? Become Hemingway? Me, as Marilyn Monroe?’” It was an irresistible idea.

“’I’ve shot various things with Sandro over the years, and he’s someone whom I love to collaborate with,” says Malkovich. “He’s impeccably prepared and very precise, though in no way a control freak. He’s a West-Side Chicago version of zen—cool, collected, but also enthusiastic and heartily midwestern in his work habits. The sessions are fun, which isn’t always the case with creative people, but also to the point. He has a wonderful appreciation of the work of all the photographers who went before him, and he’s not a cynic, thank God.”

“When he said yes, my heart was racing,” Miller recalls. “I thought, ‘Holy cow, this is amazing!’ Then you get back on the airplane to go home and it’s like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just get myself into?’”

It Can’t Be a Gimmick

It was over a year before actual shooting on the project began. “We spent most of 2013 doing extensive research, dissecting every detail of every image,” Miller says. “I sat down with my stylists, my hair and makeup people, my set builders. I said, ‘Guys, you see this? I’ve got to replicate this to perfection. See Hemingway? We’ve got to have that bad come-over hair. No, I don’t want that $29 Marilyn Monroe wig. Let’s go have a wig made.’ And that’s what we did, and it cost $2,000.”

Can sincerity and effort define the true intention of a photography project? For Miller, the answer was yes. “It was so important that it be done in a way that wasn’t comical. It could easily have been just a gimmick,” Miller says. “That’s why everything had to be done to to the utmost degree. And it couldn’t be a Photoshop project. It had to be done in camera.”

Adding to the pressure was the escalating cost of the project, which Miller financed himself. “It was another big scary part of the whole thing,” he says. His commercial work for clients like American Express, Coca-Cola, and BMW made the series possible, as it has other personal work, including a portrait series on blues musicians and a portrait project shot in Cuba.

Before Malkovich came into the studio, Miller and his crew worked out and carefully recorded the lighting setups for each shot. When the actor arrived to begin the shooting last year, a small army of 30 people were on hand—seamstresses, stylists, prop people, set builders, and makeup people. To recreate one famous Richard Avedon portrait, there were also real bees, and a beekeeper. The 41 images in the series were shot over course of six 15-hour days.

Aside from the lighting and styling details, the key to the work’s success was Malkovich’s performance. “When he was sitting in the chair being made up,” says Miller, “I would bring over the original shot we would be working on—for instance, Arthur Sasse’s photo of Einstein—and I would pin it up on the mirror in front of him, because he was going to be looking at that mirror for the next two hours. And he he would look at that image, and you could see him going to work, thinking about Einstein, looking at that tongue, looking at those eyes.”

That’s where the project began to take life. “You can’t do something like this just with makeup,” says Miller. “It’s all about attitude.”

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