Remember those awkward holiday photo sessions every kid was forced to do back in elementary school? I'm talking about the ones where you were plopped next to a pile of pumpkins or made to smile under a flurry fake snow. They were cute, sure, and my mom still says her favorite picture of me is the one where a 9-year-old me is pretending to leaf through a book in a garden while Easter bunnies loom over my shoulder. But these posed and polished photoshoots rarely ever captured one's true self.
But photographer Martin Schoeller takes a very different approach. To start, he's not snapping pictures of bleery-eyed grade schoolers at 7 am on a Monday; nah, he's most well known for his surreal, hyper-detailed celebrity photography. He often drops celebs into bizarre or heightened situations, like Alison Brie biting an action figure or Seth Meyers literally on fire. His exaggerated and absurd approach to photography still somehow results in very vulnerable work. Whether he is turning an A-ister into a living metaphor or catching a disarmingly up-close-and-personal frame, Scholler's photos are a reminder that even icons look a little weird up close.
