In addition to creating commercial and fine art photography, Jean Miele teaches Photoshop technique workshops and presents "Digital darkroom" seminars for among others, the International Center for Photography (ICP) where he is a member of the faculty; Apple Computer; Fuji USA; Hasselblad; NancyScans; The Santa Fe Workshops; American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP); Advertising Photographers of America (APA), and The Soho Gallery. He is a member of the Board of Directors of APA NY, and is on the Executive Committee of the Soho Photo Gallery, the oldest cooperative photographic gallery in New York City. He is also the facilitator and moderator of the “Soho Photo Presents” lecture series, and is actively involved in The New York Photographer’s Forum, an ongoing salon. Miele has appeared as a guest lecturer on photography at the School of Visual arts (SVA), New York University (NYU), New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the Columbia University School of Journalism.

Concurrent with his fine art work and teaching commitments, Miele has been working in commercial photography since 1984, and currently operates an independent studio providing photography for annual reports, corporate communications, advertising, and magazines. His photographs have appeared in thousands of publications.

Miele travels often, continually adding images to several ongoing bodies of work. For the last several years he has been focusing on a new series of black-and-white images entitled "Vestiges of Industry" which celebrates the vanishing beauty of pre-computer age machines and technology. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with his wife, Carol, and stepdaughter, Cally.

PHILOSOPHY: Invariably, people ask: "Where was that picture taken?" For Jean Miele, the more important question is "What feelings does that photograph evoke in you?". A successful image connects the viewer to a higher, more conscious part of themselves.

It’s tempting to believe the magic of photography is the way it allows the photographer to share a moment in time, or to tell a story about a place he visited. Consider instead the possibility that photography, like life itself, is an interpretive process, and that its greatest power is the ability to create entirely new places: metaphorical landscapes, dreams manifested on paper, which inspire us and reconnect us to a calmer, better part of ourselves.

TECHNIQUE: Working with a variety of traditional small and medium-format cameras, Miele’s images are shot and processed conventionally, as black-and-white transparencies. The resulting film is scanned at high resolution, and a computer is employed for all "darkroom" work, allowing for tremendously powerful tonal manipulation, as well as seamless image combination and alteration.

Miele’s pictures are not intended as documentary images of the beauty of the natural world. Rather, the natural landscape provides the inspiration and the raw material to make photographs; sometimes Miele’s landscapes are created from a single negative, sometimes from a composite of many negatives.