“When I started with close-up photos years ago, it was easy. Surely some people don’t like too much honesty. 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. “Do we all look the same? What are the similarities? Do we have more in common than we’d like to admit?” “I like the idea of photographing everybody in same style, famous people, homeless people, putting up for comparison so you can study the faces. 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. “But then I realized they have photographed them all exactly in the same style. Why so many water towers?” Schoeller said. “At first I didn’t understand their work. Since 1959, the couple have been taking pictures of industrial facilities and constructions such as water towers, coal barns and iron plants.

German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher have been a huge inspiration. 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.” He has been obsessed with photographing people at close range, usually on 6cmx7cm medium-format negatives.

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. “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. Althauser, Consul General of German Consulate in Shanghai, photographer Martin Schoeller, Liu Heung Shing, Pulitzer-winning photographer and founder of Shanghai Center of Photography and curator Anke Degenhard-Drinkhahn From left: Karen Smith, curator and art director of Shanghai Center of Photography, Christine D.

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