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September 29, 2019

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Home » Sunday » Art

Martin Schoeller is close up and personal

By Liu Xiaolin | 00:00 UTC+8 September 29, 2019 | Print Edition

GERMAN-BORN photographer Martin Schoeller deems himself a documentarian, “capturing all these faces of our time and building an archive.”

“It’ll be interesting to see in 30 or 40 years, faces will change more than we think,” he told Shanghai Daily during a chat before the opening of his first solo exhibition in town. Entitled “Close,” the exhibition at Shanghai Center of Photography showcases more than 60 of his representative photographs.

“Close” might be the very word to summarize the exhibition since a large number of the works on display come from his most talked-about “Close Up” portrait series.

Growing up in Germany, Schoeller applied to the photography school of Lette Verein in Berlin at age 19, and worked for celebrated photographer Annie Leibovitz later in New York, doing the lighting. He has been obsessed with photographing people at close range, usually on 6cmx7cm medium-format negatives.

“It might be my personality. I always get the feeling that if you get close, you forget about the clothes and environment, and it was all about the person and everything else falls away.”

German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher have been a huge inspiration. Since 1959, the couple have been taking pictures of industrial facilities and constructions such as water towers, coal barns and iron plants.

“At first I didn’t understand their work. Why so many water towers?” Schoeller said. “But then I realized they have photographed them all exactly in the same style. There’s a genius sense of putting them up for comparison that you can see these water towers are for the same functionality, but they came up with so many different architectural solutions to it.

“I like the idea of photographing everybody in same style, famous people, homeless people, putting up for comparison so you can study the faces.

“Do we all look the same? What are the similarities? Do we have more in common than we’d like to admit?”

To take as “honest” a portrait as possible, he often uses large fluorescent lights so that facial features would flat out, putting the focus more on the expressions.

Surely some people don’t like too much honesty. “When I started with close-up photos years ago, it was easy. People just thought it was a regular portrait, they didn’t realize I was this close, and it is a long lens, so it doesn’t feel this close,” Schoeller smiled.

“Now people are getting alert.”

Keeping his distance though, he tries to build a relationship with the subjects, playing music, making conversation to distract subjects while taking their picture.

It takes him more than a quick mind to talk subjects into the conceptual portraits for magazine assignments. A selection of these is exhibited this time at SCoP, laden with Schoeller’s subtle humor and metaphor. For example, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt poses as a bronze sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; US contemporary artist Jeff Koons as a plaster sculpture with floral headpiece; and actors George Clooney and Brad Pitt play croquet.

In 2010, Schoeller did a photo shoot with Marina Abramovic on a New York subway. The Serbian artist is famed for her avant-garde art performances. In the 1970s, she staged a thought-provoking show in Naples, Italy, when she sat, anesthetized, in a gallery for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to do with her. People started by cutting her clothes, painting on her, to cutting her body, even pointing a loaded gun at her head.

Inspired by her artworks, Schoeller came up with the idea of featuring Abramovic in the center against nude models posing around.

They met on a Sunday at 6am because they couldn’t get a permission to shoot pictures on a subway and thought it would be empty on a chilly winter morning.

Yet, the subway appeared to be surprisingly crowded. “She (Abramovic) saw I was struggling trying to make it work, so she started to take off her clothes. Once she started, everybody ran away,” he laughed.

“The hardest part is to come up with these ideas, and even harder to talk them into it. There’s such a fine line between being witty and looking stupid,” Schoeller said.

“You have to be very persuasive, and sometimes wait until the publicists go to the bathroom, so that by the time they get back, it’s too late,” he joked.

The Shanghai exhibition also includes Schoeller’s “Identical” series to give local audiences a more complete spectrum of Schoeller’s photographic works.

An assignment for National Geographic, “Identical” presents a new perspective to the old-school twins photography with comparisons of almost identical faces at close range.

Now turning more often to digital cameras for commercial jobs, Schoeller still has feelings for film, although it takes time to scan negatives and space to store them.

After all, it’s more troublesome for publicists to check the pictures and kill the ideas on site, for “a most honest picture, or something conceptual,” he joked.

Schoeller has just finished a series on Holocaust survivors where he photographed 75 survivors in Jerusalem. An exhibition and a book will come out in January to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz.

There’ll also be a colorful series on drag queens, and he’s working on a video portrait about death row exonerations in the United States, Schoeller disclosed.

The “Close: Martin Schoeller” exhibition runs through November 20.

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