“To give people a voice who don’t have a voice on Instagram.Īccording to a U.S. “That’s a good way to use Instagram,” he says. My goal was to basically have them step forward and talk about their life and explain why they are homeless.”īeyond the portraits themselves is a greater project inspired by the commitment of Schoeller’s friends and volunteers who have worked at GWHFC since its inception: to raise $200,000 as a down payment on a permanent commercial lot for the coalition to serve their clients in a welcoming structure, rather than on a street corner, which often causes complaints from neighbors and public officials.Īnd to reach more people, Schoeller chose Instagram, a platform he had ignored until then. “We see homeless people or perceive them every day, but we don’t really meet any of them ever in our daily interactions. “I started this whole project with the idea of bringing awareness, with the idea of giving homeless people a face and a voice,” Schoeller says.

This time, equipped with his trademark Kino fluorescent tube lighting, he positioned himself on the corner of Sycamore and Romaine streets in Downtown Los Angeles, where the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition (GWHFC) serves fresh hot dinners to the homeless and needy all year around. Admired for his close-up head shots of celebrities and influential leaders that sparked a different take on portrait photography since the late 1990s, Martin Schoeller also photographs lesser-known people: He documented identical twins in a book he published in 2012, and also set up a working studio on a sidewalk on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, stopping passersby for impromptu portraits.

Martin schoeller twins