I discovered the work of Martin Schoeller many years ago and have been a fan of his photographs ever since. His large close-ups portraits of both celebrities and unknowns were a great inspiration for my own photographic work.
Martin Schoeller, now age 51, was born and raised in Germany before he moved to New York in 1993 where he started his career as an assistant of Annie Leibovitz. After striking out on his own, he worked for different magazines and journals before he became famous for the close-up portraits of celebrities. All of them are taken from the same angle and were shot with the same lighting and background, nonetheless bringing out individuality and intimacy in each shot.
Over the years he photographed hundreds of politicians, models, singers or actors, for example Jack Nicholson, Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga or Bill Clinton, but also unknowns. The technique behind them is simple but the results are breath-taking: Schoeller uses a medium format camera for roll film.
Schoeller explains that the sitters are not lighted with camera flashes but with fluorescent light banks which are used for a very shallow depth of field (Schoeller, 2009). It really brings out the eyes and the lips, which are in focus while everything else is blurred.The celebrities, though famous and loved by many, look very vulnerable: Showing the faces in extreme close-ups exposes unfamiliar detail and emphasizes the differences in human faces as well:
“I can walk away with a picture that does a person justice. That it’s all about the person rather than about a setting that has nothing to do with them, maybe some clothes that have nothing to do with that person. Also, I always felt that a lot of portraits, and it’s even gotten worse since I started ten years ago, are so much about making people look good, and the artifice behind them and putting people on the pedestal, and celebrating them. So this is a much more honest approach and much more interesting to me. Basically, I don’t really see myself as a photographer who tries to make people look bad, or, which often says “my subjects don’t look very good.” I just think I’m trying to take real portraits, what portraits should be like. Showing a person for who they are and what they look like without retouching, without tricky lighting, without distortion, without crazy wide angle lenses, without any cheap tricks, just straight up honest portraits.”
Schoeller, 2009
Schoeller, M. (2009) ‘Q&A: The Technique Behind Martin Schoeller’s Photography.’ Interview with Abby Callard for Smithsonian, 24 September. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-technique-behind-martin-schoellers-photography-17906064/ (Accessed: 05 October 2019)
header photo: Schoeller, M. (2004) Barack Obama. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-martin-schoeller-captures-worlds-famous-startling-intimacy (Accessed: 05 December 2019).
Documentation of MEDI512 "Experiment" 