Latest news with #MartinSchoeller
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Story Behind TIME‘s Donald Trump 100 Days Cover
Credit - Photographs by Martin Schoeller for TIME Thirty minutes into our interview with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 22, an aide opened the door to tell the President that India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on the line. She gave Trump a typed note, and he picked up the phone on his desk. Hold music could be heard. Earlier in the day, gunmen had killed 26 people at a resort town in Kashmir, and Trump told us to keep our seats while he offered condolences to his fellow world leader. At one point he mouthed the word terrorism to us as an explanation for the call. At another moment during the call he waved at the back wall of the Oval Office, as if to say we should take a look at the paintings and decoration he had added to the room. ('This is new and improved,' Trump said of the office when we entered.) This was the fourth interview the President has done with TIME since clinching the Republican nomination for President last spring, and a rare long-form, on-the-record interview, one of the longest with any news organization since his Inauguration in January. We were there to ask Trump about his first 100 days in office, a milestone for any presidency, and certainly for one as ambitious and aggressive as this one. The conversation came at a moment of incipient crises for Trump's second term. That morning, his handling of the economy had unleashed painful headlines. The performance of major American stock indexes was drawing comparisons to 1928 and 1932. ('Just don't move,' Trump advised when the question of retirement savings came up. 'You'll be good. You'll see.') Pete Hegseth, Trump's Defense Secretary, was facing scrutiny for a staff exodus and his handling of sensitive information. Conflicts abroad, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he said during the campaign he could solve in a day, continue to fester. 'The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what's taken so long?' he told us. But what was on our minds was Trump's transformation of the American presidency. Over his first 100 days, he has sought to take power from rival U.S. institutions—the courts, Congress, media, law firms, universities—consolidating it in the presidency with a breadth and speed unseen at least since FDR, possibly ever. Trump, for his part, rejected the notion that he was stretching the powers of the presidency. 'I don't feel I'm expanding it,' he told us. 'I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used.' Trump's return to Washington can still shock. In the private dining room, where Trump watched the attack on the U.S. Capitol play out four years ago on television, the TV showed Fox News footage of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, briefing the press. On the table sat a pile of papers, including a large map of Ukraine, and a golden television remote. The boxing championship belt that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left behind after his recent failed visit with Trump hangs above a door frame. In a small room off the dining room are a pair of cabinets holding merchandise for visitors, including MAGA hats in red, white, and black, travel mugs, Trump-branded towels, and golden Trump basketball sneakers. For more than 100 years, TIME has covered world leaders, providing exclusive interviews and reporting to increase transparency and accountability. As in the past, we are publishing the full transcript of our interview with Trump and analysis of his remarks along with this week's cover story, written by Eric Cortellessa, who covered the most recent Trump campaign and the President's return to office for TIME. Trump's engagement with TIME, as he will tell you, goes back decades. He was first on the cover in 1989. The cover accompanying Cortellessa's story is Trump's 46th, a tally equaling that of Ronald Reagan, whose portrait now hangs prominently in the Oval Office. The two Republican Presidents are second only to another, Richard Nixon, who has been on the cover of TIME more than any other individual. Our new cover photo was taken by Martin Schoeller, who first photographed Trump for TIME's cover a decade ago, the summer after he launched his first presidential campaign, beginning a political story that has altered this century. The headline on that one: 'Deal with it.' Write to Sam Jacobs at
Gulf Today
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
New York photographer covers the famous and homeless
For over three decades, Martin Schoeller has been at the forefront of contemporary portraiture. His signature close-up style scrutinises faces with an almost forensic intensity, capturing both the powerful and the powerless with unfiltered precision – always applying the same style and approach to all. Speaking at the International Photography Festival (Xposure) 2025, the renowned New York-based photographer offered a candid look at his career, detailing his unconventional beginnings, the artistic ethos driving his work, and the unpredictable, often chaotic, nature of his shoots. Schoeller recalled his early financial struggles admitting, 'I was broke. I had no money'. Desperate for work, he embedded himself with the Newark police department, bluffing his way into their confidence. 'I told the press secretary I was working for a German magazine on a piece about police work in the United States. He never checked my credentials and just said, 'Okay, I have these two detectives you can hang out with.'' His big break came in 1998 when Time Out New York commissioned him to photograph Vanessa Redgrave. Over the years, Schoeller has captured an estimated 3,000 close-up portraits. The breadth of his subjects is staggering: celebrities, world leaders, athletes, the homeless, death row exonerees, and Holocaust survivors. He has consistently pushed the boundaries of portraiture, blending conceptual elements with his journalistic instincts. A favourite example was his 2003 portrait of Quentin Tarantino, taken at the height of Kill Bill's notoriety. Another classic was his portrait of Tony Hawk, in which the legendary skateboarder leaps off his own kitchen counter with his wife and two children sharing the frame. 'He wanted to be photographed in a skate park,' Schoeller admitted. 'I told his wife, 'It'll make a great Christmas card.' So she made him do it,' he remarked jokingly. Schoeller has not only documented the famous but also shed light on the overlooked. One of his most personal projects involved photographing and interviewing over 300 homeless individuals in Los Angeles. 'I set up my studio next to a food truck run by a friend's father,' he said. 'Because people trusted him, they trusted me.' A particularly poignant encounter came when he photographed a young runaway named Frisk. 'His mother contacted me after seeing his portrait on Instagram. With the help of other homeless people, we found him, and he ended up moving back home. Out of 300 stories, that was the one happy ending.' Schoeller's commitment to social issues extends to his work with Witness to Innocence, an organisation supporting death row exonerees. His multi-year project capturing the harrowing experiences of exonerated individuals culminated in an exhibition, a National Geographic feature, and a museum show. 'It took me two years to gain the trust (of the editors). At first, they thought my portraits looked like mugshots, not something they wanted to be remembered by.' The 'hardest part' Despite the changing landscape of editorial photography, Schoeller remains steadfast in his approach. 'Advertising jobs pay the bills, which lets me fund personal projects where I can lose money,' he quipped. 'But the hardest part? Coming up with an idea that makes sense and convincing someone famous to do it. You don't see the failures. But for every 10 ideas, I'm lucky if three or four happen.' As he wrapped up his talk, Schoeller reflected on his body of work with characteristic candour. 'Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don't. But if you're taking pictures for yourself first, not just for the subject, then you're on the right track.' His portraits — whether of A-listers or the forgotten — continue to resonate because they strip away artifice, leaving only the subject and their story. For Martin Schoeller, that's all that has ever mattered. This is one of the many talks at Xposure this year, where the visitors are not only getting an opportunity to immerse themselves in the brilliant photography but also interact closely with the creative geniuses behind the lens. Xposure 2025 is a free-to-attend event and will run until February 26 at Aljada, Sharjah. For more details on the programmes, workshops, exhibitions, visit:
