Martin Schoeller is one of my favorite contemporary photographers at the moment. His images were the inspiration for the portraits I'm currently shooting. I feel as though people tend to get excited about them due to the color, scale and subject however; the fact that the majority of his portraits are of public figures gives a certain connection to the person with in the image due to my mass-pop-culture-overload.
Some of Suzanne Opton's portraits convey a certain vulnerability with in them; by positioning the subjects on the floor she removed "their psychological defenses... (she) has successfully disarmed them." Some of these images are of soldiers, who with out being given the prompt, you would never know there identity that lies with in.
Denis Rouvre's series 'Broken Faces' has a brutal honesty to it, the typically confrontational stance of the Rugby players in each image shows the ware of the sport they play. More interesting to me is that "he did not impose his own expressions, but allowed his subjects to present themselves as they would like to be seen. Well aware of the high value placed on machismo by their fans, the players act the part while subtly mocking the ludicrous script they are obliged to adopt." I disagree with that second sentence however, based off of most of the portraits I don't get a sense of phony rugged attitude, I see it more as men wearing the battle scars of a recent game, won or lost, proudly.
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