Miller Mobley

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Miller Mobley (born 1986 in Tuscaloosa) is a commercial portrait photographer and restaurateur.

Miller is the son of Reggie and Cecilia Mobley and the grandson of Mobley & Sons founder C. D. Mobley. He grew up in Tuscaloosa and attended the University of Alabama where he began taking photography classes toward a vague goal of becoming a cinematographer. He absorbed books about Annie Leibovitz and Richard Avedon, and took to traveling back roads to find subjects with innate character to photograph, building up an impressive portrait portfolio.

Around 2007 he began interviewing with advertising agencies in the area and earned enough commissions that he dropped out of school to work full time. Among his commissioned projects were a series of portraits for the Alabama Department of Tourism's "Year of Music" promotion in 2011, managed by Luckie & Co.

Mobley submitted a series of portraits of Mormon missionaries to a competition sponsored by American Illustration and American Photography. Marcel Saba of Redux Pictures was impressed by his work and took him on as his agent, sending him assignments from New York. In March 2011 he and his wife, Jana, who plans and produces his portrait sessions, moved to a tiny apartment in Chelsea, but found that the expected commissions were slow in coming. After the April 2011 tornado outbreak, the Mobleys volunteered their services for a "Relief Portraits" event at the American Christian Academy gymnasium, making new portraits for families that had lost all of their photographs in the storms. In 2012 he took an assignment for a web-only story about genetic testing of infants for TIME magazine, which eventually was made a feature story for the print edition, with his photograph on the cover.

After securing a short meeting with Jennifer Laski of Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles, Mobley began getting regular work shooting celebrity portraits. Among hundreds of assignments, he was commissioned to take a portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House for Parade magazine in 2014. He later photographed Mrs Obama again for the cover of her memoir, Becoming.

Mobley has taken a few steps toward his early goal of working as a cinematographer. He shot a speculative commercial that was bought by Everlast and photographed a teaser trailer for the third season of the Netflix series "The Crown".

Since moving to Birmingham in 2018, Mobley has been involved in developing two new eateries. Slim's Pizzeria in Crestline Village opened in 2021 with involvement from Mobley, John Rolen, Charles Morgan III, and John Michael Bodnar. In 2023 he won zoning approval for a new "city tavern" concept for the former Redmont R & D building at 2614 Highland Avenue.

The Mobleys have two children.

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