American/German
born 1968Martin Schoeller is a freelance photographer who is best known for his portraits of both celebrities and ordinary people. Schoeller was born in Munich, and studied photography at Lette Verein, in Berlin. He worked as a photographer in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1993. Once in the United States, he settled in New York, where he worked as an assistant to Annie Leibovitz (American, b. 1949). Leibovitz, who is best known for taking the last professional photograph of John Lennon hours before his murder, helped Schoeller learn the craft of magazine photography.
Schoeller worked for Leibovitz for three years before deciding to become an independent freelance photographer in 1996. Three years later, he began contributing photographs regularly to the New Yorker. Over the next ten years, he contributed portrait photographs to a variety of magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, The Outsider, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. In 2000, he won the LIFE Magazine Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Best New Talent. That same year, he got married to a graphic designer named Helene Rutman.
In the 2000s, Schoeller moved into publishing books of photographs. His first book of portraits, Close-Up: Portraits 1998-2005, was published by TeNeues in 2005, and he followed this up with two books of photographs in 2008. Pond Press published Female Bodybuilders that year, while Stern published his portfolio book, Fotographie Portfolio #54. Schoeller has lent his photographs to museums for solo exhibitions since 2005. In March 2012, some of his work was exhibited at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Mizner Park, FL, and his work has been displayed in museums all over Europe and the United States since 2005. His work also permanently hangs in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery. Schoeller lives in Manhattan, where he continues to produce new portraits for use in magazines and as stand-alone pieces of art on a regular basis.