Martin Schoeller gathers two complementary strands of the photographer’s practice into a compact survey. Barack Obama and Angelina Jolie appear among its familiar subjects, while photographs of female bodybuilders introduce a markedly different register of physical presence. Across these portraits, celebrity is not treated as a protective surface. Extreme proximity makes pores, wrinkles and minute shifts of expression impossible to overlook, redirecting attention from public identity to the particular facts of a face.

The close-ups are only one part of the book. Schoeller also works through staged photographs: compressed, sometimes dark scenarios shaped by the imaginative logic of fairy tales and blockbuster cinema. Where the headshots depend upon directness and scrutiny, these constructed scenes use action, setting and artifice to suggest stories beyond the frame. The inclusion of both colour and black-and-white images further emphasizes the range within his work.

Placed together, the two approaches complicate any simple account of Schoeller as a photographer of famous faces. His close portraits withhold the usual distance between subject and viewer, undermining the polish associated with publicity imagery. The staged pictures move in the opposite direction, turning outward toward fiction and spectacle. The book’s significance lies in this tension between exact observation and elaborate invention, and in the technical control that holds both modes together.

Published by teNeues in 2009 as Stern Fotografie Portfolio No. 54, this 96-page hardcover presents a concentrated view of Schoeller’s portrait language at that moment. For collectors of contemporary portraiture and editorial photography, its interest is documentary as well as formal: it situates the widely recognized close-up method within a broader practice that also embraces performance, narrative and constructed worlds.