Martin Schoeller’s *Identical: Portraits of Twins* brings his close-up portrait method to a narrowly defined and unusually demanding subject: forty sets of identical twins. Published by teNeues in 2012, the book assembles 110 colour photographs in which resemblance is not treated as an endpoint, but as the condition for a more exacting act of looking.

Schoeller’s consistent framing gives the project its structure. Presented under comparable visual terms, each face can be read against another whose features may at first appear interchangeable. The longer one looks, however, the more expression, facial structure and minute asymmetries begin to assert themselves. Repetition sharpens rather than suppresses difference. It also exposes the speed with which viewers classify faces, recognize patterns and attach character to physical detail.

Twins have long occupied a place in myth and popular imagination, but Schoeller avoids theatricalizing that history. His approach is direct and systematic, shifting attention from the supposed mystery of doubling to the everyday construction of identity. The photographs ask how much of individuality is visible, how much is inferred, and how readily familiarity alters perception. Across the series, likeness becomes a precise instrument for examining portraiture itself: what a camera records, what a viewer projects and what remains irreducibly personal.

For collectors concerned with contemporary portrait photography, the book deserves attention as a concentrated application of Schoeller’s close-up practice. Its subject establishes a disciplined comparative framework, while the accumulation of portraits turns small distinctions into the work’s central content. The substantial hardcover was issued with text in English, German and French, reinforcing its character as a considered monograph rather than a loose selection of images. Its significance lies in this sustained alignment of subject and method: a portrait study in which formal consistency makes individuality newly legible.