King of the theater Claus Peymann wearing a cardboard crown; art icon Jeff Koons laughing while lying on a big plastic ball; Richard Serra with a look of expressive concentration, or in miniature disappearing into one of his steel sculptures: over the past fifteen years, Oliver Mark has photographed countless artists, actors, politicians, and other celebrities. Sometimes focusing only on his subjects in a minimal setting, sometimes placing them in front of an artful background, Mark presents the rich and famous in constantly new, yet trenchant ways and succeeds in bringing much of their inner nature to light.

Alongside his most successful portraits this volume contains some of Mark’s most beautiful photographs of fashion, architecture, and landscapes. It also features texts by Christoph Amend, Wolfgang Behnken, Chistian Boros, Ingeborg Harms, Dietmar Henneka, Margit J. Mayer, Jonathan Meese, and Silke Müller as well as an interview with Yilmaz Aktepe.

Oliver Mark was born in Gelsenkirchen in 1963. In the late 1980s, after completing his training as a photographer, he began taking portrait photographs of public figures for magazines like Architectural Digest, Cosmopolitain, Elle, Stern, TIME Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and ZEIT Magazin. His work has been shown in exhibitions all over the world. He is a member of the BFF – the German Association of Freelance Photographers.

Achim Heine, the editor of this book, was born in 1955. He is currently a professor at Berlin University of the Arts and a partner of the design bureau Heine/Lenz/Zizka. He is also a member of the board of the German Design Council and has published many books on brand culture, design, and photography.