Spent a lovely sunny day in on the riverfront in Rotterdam.

The city appears to be booming. Everywhere you glance there seems to be a new steel and glass tower sprouting out of the ground and mixing with the older buildings that survived the devastation of WWII. Most everything around appears to be prospering.

 

 

Our main purpose here is a visit to the Nederlands/Fotomuseum to see Martin Schoeller’s “Big Heads” show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When asked how to take better pictures, renowned photojournalist Robert Capra said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough,  your not close enough.”  Well,  Martin Schoeller definitely gets close enough.

This is the New York based German photographer’s first show in the Netherlands and the images are truly mind-blowing. The show is broken into five groups, transgender, female body builders, twins, cultural personalities and everything else. Most of the images stem from Schoeller’s Close Up series, which he has been working on for over 20 years.

The sheer size of these extreme closeups is jaw dropping. It’s a bit like looking at everyone in a makeup mirror, very intimate and kind of scary. You are struck by the courage of the subjects who have to know that this is not going to be flattering. Especially movie personalities who must spend their entire adult lives scrutinizing every pore on their faces. You discover quickly that staring this closely at people is a lot like unretouched nudes of “normal” people, in that, there is really only a handful of adults on the planet that don’t look a little funny with their clothes off, intriguing, sure, titillating, you bet, but also a little peculiar and definitely unique. But just like nudes, these images allow us to cross the line from public into private as we are offered the most intimate view they could give us without taking off a stitch of clothes.

The Museum set up a photo booth and we were encouraged to have our picture taken. Bear in mind this was before we saw the show so we really had no idea just how bad this could turn out. Click on the thumbnail if you dare.

 

Wendi insisted that I retouch it to all the lines and blemishes.

 

 

As a side note, only two images were labeled NFS, Julia Roberts and Taylor Swift, which were arguably the two most attractive images in the whole show. Hum.