“I Am Interested In The Idea Of Documenting Faces Of Our Times”
An appreciation for the portrait wizardry of Martin Schoeller
by David Schonauer
“Like most portrait photographers, I aim to record the instant the subject is not thinking about being photographed, striving to get beyond the practiced facial performance, reaching for something unplanned,” said the noted portraitist Martin Schoeller in a recent interview.
Capturing that moment when shooting celebrities who are used to being in front of cameras — especially trained actors — can’t be difficult. It is far less so, Schoeller says, when photographing a homeless person.
“They don’t stand in front of mirrors and practice their facial expressions. They don’t pose as much,” he says.
Over the past 10 months, Schoeller has photographed and interviewed more than 180 homeless people in Los Angeles in a makeshift studio set up at the corner of Sycamore and Romaine streets in West Hollywood, where they are served dinners by an aid organization, the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. Schoeller, who is based in New York, works on the project when he flies to LA for commercial and editorial jobs — “three days here, two days there, whenever I can,” he says.
Schoeller credits his awareness of LA’s homeless to an old friend, Audrey Landreth, a former photo editor at Rolling Stone who gave him some of his first magazine assignments.
“Her parents have been feeding homeless people for 28 years; they are dedicated to helping people on the street, and that kind of inspired me,” he says. “At one point, when things were a little slow, I thought I would just go and see what this food coalition is all about.”
At first, Schoeller just photographed the homeless in the small studio he set up. Then he used his cell phone (taped to a Kino Flo light) to record interviews with them. “I asked the questions most people would ask: ‘Why are you on the street?’ ‘Why are you homeless?’ ‘Are you doing drugs?’ All these things,” he says.
Later he began posting the photographs and transcriptions of the interviews at Instagram. “I’m a little old-school — I’d never done anything on Instagram,” he says. “But I thought, ’Hmm, maybe this is a great project for Instagram. Maybe it’s a different approach to Instagram — not spotlighting my privileged, spoiled life, but instead using it in a way that it hasn’t been used so much yet.”
Within six weeks, the Instagram feed had more than 60,000 followers. Schoeller’s portraits of the homeless have been highlighted by People magazine and National Geographic, two of the publications he shoots for regularly, and featured by Los Angeles magazine, which noted in its article that some 26,000 Angelenos are currently in need of housing.
Schoeller followed up by launching a fundraising project for the Food Coalition, which hopes to acquire a permanent facility. He wants to raise $200,000 through small donations and larger contributions that come with a range of rewards. A $125 gift, for instance, earns donors a GWHFC apron, while $1,000 gets them a 20 x 24-inch print from Schoeller’s homeless portrait series. For $75,000, they can have a private portrait session with Schoeller, and the chance to join the vast collection of humanity he has documented throughout his career.
A Catalog of People
“It’s been a lot more challenging than I ever anticipated, because I’ve grown so emotionally attached to the project for the Food Coalition and to the people I’ve photographed,” Schoeller says. “I’m so determined to make this succeed.”
Schoeller’s commitment to the work rests on his commitment to a particular kind of photography. If his portraits capture and express the individuality of his subjects, they do so within a much larger context. “I am interested in the idea of documenting faces of our times, building a catalog — photographing people from many different backgrounds in the exact same style, revealing glimpses of humanity that are universal,” he told National Geographic in November.
Born in Munich, Germany, in 1968, Schoeller studied photography at the Lette Verein school in Berlin and was influenced early on by two of the most important works of German photography: August Sander’s early-20th-century portraits of people from various strata of German society, and the typological studies of industrial buildings and structures taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The portraits Schoeller is best known for are his tightly framed and highly detailed studies of faces — a rigorous style he has used to photograph everyone from President Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to assorted movie stars and people from the Kayapo tribe of the Amazon. His first book, Close Up: Portraits 1998–2005, which featured his portraits of celebrities, was followed by Female Bodybuilders (2008) and Identical: Portraits of Twins (2012). His most recent book, a mid-career retrospective called simply Portrait: Martin Schoeller, was released earlier this year.
Schoeller left Germany in 1993 to work as an assistant for Annie Leibovitz, a job he held for three years. “I would never be where I am now if I hadn’t worked for her. I learned a tremendous amount. And that was because it was so intense. She’s very demanding and has little patience,” he says. “She also gave me a lot of responsibility — much more than I do with my own employees now. I was in charge of lighting, and she didn’t even want to know what kind of equipment i was ordering. The first time she cared about lighting was when I handed her a Polaroid. Having worked with Annie, I feel so technically competent. No matter what situation you throw me in, I can handle it.”
The experience and technical know-how come together in his own portraits. What is remarkable about them is the degree to which the subject being examined emerges as a vivid, meaningful person within the strict confines and consistency of his compositions. In a 2008 interview at the Conscientious photo blog, curator and collector William Hunt said the genius of Schoeller’s work was his ability to elicit “real life” his in his subjects.
“He seems to connect with them, and this shows up in the images,” said Hunt, who championed Schoeller’s work at New York’s Hasted Hunt (now Hasted Kraeutler) gallery. In doing that, he added, the work transcends the basic information-gathering function of portraiture — a rare feat.
Finding A Voice
“In photographing the homeless, I find that it’s the young people I meet who are the most heartbreaking,” Schoeller says. “There was one girl, Kemi, who’s 19 years old and has been in and out of homes for five years. When you talk to them, what resonates the most is that these were people who were never loved in their lives — and sometimes more than that, being abused and abandoned by parents — and they have this strong underlying insecurity. It’s easy to see why these people don’t find a way in life, why they don’t find a job. If you don’t have that basic confidence in your own capabilities, it’s really tough to do anything.”
Schoeller says that he was “quite lost” as a teenager and found his confidence after being accepted into the competitive photography school he attended. “A friend of mine who was applying said I should try as well, even though I had never photographed anything. He gave me some pointers, and I submitted some pictures. I ended up getting in, and he didn’t. It was just such a revelation to me that I was good at something.”
It was at the school that Schoeller also discovered his interest in shooting people from many different backgrounds. Inspired by the popular German book Christane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, an account of a young heroin addict and her life in Berlin, he began photographing homeless people and drug addicts near the Berlin Zoologischer Garten train station, or “Bahnhof Zoo,” where the book was set.
When he talks to young photographers, Schoeller tells them to follow their instincts and interests and, above all, to take pictures.
“Honestly, I think people talk too much about photography these days and do too little of it,” he says. “Young photographers today can overthink it. My biggest advice is, ‘Don’t spend all day on your computer, because your computer doesn’t take pictures. Go out and find yourself a project and just do it.’”
Originally published by AI-AP. David Schonauer is Editor of Pro Photo Daily, Profiles and Motion Arts Pro. Follow him on Twitter. Jeffrey Roberts is Publisher of American Photography (AI-AP) the finest juried collection of photography in hardcover as well as Pro Photo Daily. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter. Follow Pro Photo Daily on Facebook.
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