Martin Schoeller on Intimate Portraiture

I’ve highlighted Martin Schoeller a couple times on my blog so I feel compelled to share this well produced and simple segment by National Geographic’s new photography section called Proof (only 3 days old).

Proof is National Geographic’s new online photography experience. It was launched to engage ongoing conversations about photography, art, and journalism. In addition to featuring selections from the magazine and other publications, books, and galleries, this site will offer new avenues for our audience to get a behind-the-scenes look at the National Geographic storytelling process. We view this as a work in progress and welcome feedback as the site evolves.

Click here to watch the video…

Background on Proof

Here’s some additional background about Proof from their inaugural blog post a few days ago…

For more than a century, National Geographic has been home to some of the very best photographic storytelling on (and, occasionally, off) the planet. We all know what the Yellow Border represents; we all have our favorite cover; we all remember the wonder of seeing, year after year, amazing photographs from unbelievable places alongside stories of our own communities and neighbors, living extraordinary lives right under our noses.

Indeed, many of us who work at National Geographic grew up with the magazine fueling our desire to explore, tell stories, and pick up a camera. Because of its view that the storyteller, the photographer, must be given the time, tools, and guidance to do their best work, Nat Geo has inspired writers, astronauts, and explorers, as well as photographers, to strive for perfection so that they could tell their own stories within the pages of National Geographic magazine.

Today’s stories, thanks to the Internet, are being told, minute by minute, at an incredible rate. The tools to tell these stories, whether we are talking photos, audio, video, or multimedia, are now so commonplace that almost anyone can be a content creator, sharing their work with the world.

With our new photo blog, Proof, we want to share our experiences and adventures with you — and hope you will share your stories with us.

Proof will offer a real-time look at our storytelling process — everything from how to edit down 60,000 photographs to 12, to which single item a photographer on a four-month assignment can’t live without. Equally important to us is finding more incredible stories that you, our members, have created, and then spreading them around the globe. We want to celebrate, with you, all the possibilities for visual storytelling that this new century offers.

We are launching our blog alongside our 125th anniversary issue on the Power of Photography with the hope that Proof will inspire you, as our editor Chris Johns likes to say, to “tell meaningful stories in unforgettable ways.” Join us on our latest adventure. — Keith Jenkins and Sarah Leen, Directors of Photography

Join the conversation on Twitter at #NatGeoProof.

You can also learn about the people behind Proof.