Bobby Miller

“I knew that the minute he took his hat off, he was going to turn around and fix his hair,” says Miller. In the photograph Miller captured, Halston’s suave grin speaks volumes. Looking at the photo, Miller’s grin speaks volumes, too. “Nobody else has that shot,” he says.

Armed with a 35mm camera, the watchful eye of a paparazzo, and a preternatural sense of knowing exactly when to click his shutter — the ability to seize what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” — Miller has been taking pictures of the famous and infamous (and occasionally the not-so-famous) for more than four decades.

But fame isn’t the only criterion for subjects that catch his eye. “I am always drawn to the unusual, the black sheep, the misfit, the clowns and freaks who don’t quite fit in,” he says.

It’s a predilection that reflects his artistic training. Miller studied with Lisette Model, the Austrian-born photographer whose street photography influenced Diane Arbus. And through looking at the work of Arbus, whose photographs often presented extreme outliers of the human condition, Miller gained confidence in staking out his own territory, which came to include the glitterati of New York City during the golden years of disco.