Martin Schoeller: Close brings together 120 portraits made between 2005 and 2018, placing internationally recognized figures beside subjects who may be unfamiliar to the viewer. Artists and entertainers, architects, political actors, business leaders and athletes appear within the same sustained project: Julia Roberts, Adele, Frank Gehry, Marina Abramović, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer are among those photographed.
Schoeller applies an exacting visual protocol throughout. Each face is recorded at close range, from a consistent camera angle and under comparable lighting; expressions remain largely neutral—serious but not rigid. By withholding the theatrical settings and gestures that commonly support public identity, he directs attention toward minute distinctions of skin, gaze and bearing. The apparent uniformity is not an end in itself, but a device for making difference newly legible.
The conceptual model was Bernd and Hilla Becher’s systematic photography of water towers. Schoeller transfers that typological discipline from industrial structures to human faces, where standardization inevitably encounters expression, age, familiarity and status. The inclusion of lesser-known sitters complicates the hierarchy of celebrity: recognition becomes only one response among many, rather than the governing principle of the portrait. Viewed together, the photographs form a study of how individuality persists within a deliberately level framework.
Published by Steidl in 2018, the 136-page hardcover measures approximately 28.4 by 35.6 centimetres, a scale suited to the project’s scrutiny of facial detail. For a serious photobook collection, its significance lies in the clarity with which a long-running portrait practice is resolved as a book: repeated form enables sustained comparison, while the span of subjects situates Schoeller’s method within the public culture of the early twenty-first century. Close rewards attention not through spectacle, but through the accumulating tension between a fixed photographic system and faces that refuse to become equivalent.
