WINCHESTER -- Martin Schoeller has one of the simplest, yet most distinctive, styles of any photographer working today. He shoots color portraits that are big, very big. The 19 examples that are in "Close Up," which runs at the Griffin Museum of Photography through April 15, are all about 3 1/2 feet by 4 feet or 2 1/2 feet by 3 1/2 feet. They feel even bigger than they actually are because -- and this is the other thing that distinguishes Schoeller's work -- they are all tight close-ups, minus any frame of reference.
Up close and impersonal
Schoeller's tight focus emphasizes parts over whole
A German, Schoeller came to America in 1993 to work as Annie Leibovitz's assistant. He eventually followed in her celebrity-chronicling tracks, working for such magazines as Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New Yorker.
Leibovitz and Schoeller may share subject matter, but the great influences on his work have been August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher . From Sander, he took an almost-clinical approach to portraiture, an awareness of the camera as taxonomic tool. From the Bechers, who specialize in photographs of industrial architecture, such as silos and warehouses, he learned the power of objectivity and straightforwardness.
What Schoeller offers, you might say, is the face as water tank: a structure of being rather than state of being. His work owes more to autopsy than portraiture. We see Jack Nicholson and John McEnroe and Angelina Jolie and the rest up close and impersonal. They stare back at the camera, impassive, well aware that a smile or grimace at so short a distance would overpower the lens.
It's as if Schoeller plants his camera at the intersection of optics and psychology. Past a certain spatial point, personality (the sitter's) battles with myopia (the viewer's). Intimacy becomes a function of dermatology rather than emotion. The face is all: the mug shot as monument. Easter Island has totems. Our Age of
Famous appearances can alter when seen in this way. Who'd have thought Nicholson could ever look very nearly normal. Andre Agassi has a haunted aspect. The swollen majesty of Magic Johnson's head makes it resemble a slightly ovoid basketball.
The merest accoutrements can assume a near-monstrous importance on these faces. Which has more visual weight (and a very weighty weight, at that): Donald Rumsfeld's rimless glasses? Marilyn Manson's rivulets of red face paint? Judi Dench's eye liner? Tammy Faye Bakker's forest of false eyelashes?
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