"Close Up", images by Martin Schoeller
February 15 - April 15, 2007
The Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester, MA 01890
781-729-1158
Tuesday - Thursday: 11AM - 5PM
Friday: 11AM - 4PM
Saturday and Sunday: Noon - 4PM
Admission $5 Adults, Seniors $2 Students and Members FREE
Thursday admission FREE
For celebrity junkies and even commoners like ptatlarge, gazing at the faces of the famous is endlessly fascinating. Martin Schoeller’s nineteen head shots of actors, athletes, rockers, and politicians is a visual feast. The exhibit fills walls of the modest gallery inside the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.
The portraits are huge, some as large as 3 feet by 4 feet (Angelina Jolie) and none smaller than 2 feet by 3 feet. They’re brilliantly printed studio "head shots", softly lit, but tightly focused in an extremely
narrow focal plane. Schoeller zeroes in on the eyes and anything within that plane - cheeks, lips, mouth. All else - tip of the nose or ears are not in focus. With enlargement on this scale, you’d think we could see a hint of what makes the subject tick or wonder about the curl of a lip, an arch of the brow, a glint in the eye or a concerto involving all three.
Not so. The face of every subject is a deadpan, void of expression. Why? If he wants us to construct our own stories, as he professes, why not make us ask the reason for that smirk, or the furrowed brow, or the frown?
He presents us with masks.
Some with luminous skin, others with faint or deeply etched lines around mouths and eyes, like rings on a tree, suggesting the age of the subject. That’s as close a hint we have as to their humanity. Perhaps that’s what Schoeller wants, to strip them of their trappings of power or success and present only their naked faces, well known but with the same pores and lines as we have on our own.
Unfortunately, we want more. We’re probably more like the pilot fish that attach themselves to our most magnificent mammals, the whales, and let the whales take them places they could never reach by themselves.
Schoeller appears to be similar to his onetime boss Annie Leibovitz. He has strong opinions about his methods and how his photos are presented. “The number and identities of his photos were a mystery to us until the day before we got them,” the Griffin curator said. He insisted on arranging the sequence of the photos and even the height from which they’d be mounted from the floor, she said. An artist is entitled to that.
The scale of the photographs and their extraordinarily saturated color printing are truly impressive. But for all the technical virtuosity, they were all hauntingly similar. Schoeller’s aim is to have us create our own stories for his faces. Sadly, most of us prefer the stories we read in People Magazine.
Subjects:
Angelina Jolie, Magic Johnson, Frankie Velella, Donald Rumsfeld, Marilyn Manson, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Jack Nicholson, Cindy Sherman, John McEnroe, Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, André Aggaziz, Piwa Ndogo, Thomas, Jackson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Mosner, Tammy Faye Bakker
For more about Martin Schoeller, click
http://mediastorm.org/0002.htm
Griffin Museum of Photography
http://www.griffinmuseum.org
Back from sailing - it was a great adventure. Love reading your blogs - thanks for sending them. Hope we can see this exhibit . Am in porocess of buying new boat - if it makes it back to New England before the fall, Geery and I want you to join us for a sail. Keep well. Love, Babs
Posted by: B | April 05, 2007 at 12:34 PM
Back from sailing - it was a great adventure. Love reading your blogs - thanks for sending them. Hope we can see this exhibit . Am in porocess of buying new boat - if it makes it back to New England before the fall, Geery and I want you to join us for a sail. Keep well. Love, Babs
Posted by: B | April 05, 2007 at 12:36 PM