In the course of his decades-long career as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as a British war correspondent, Beaton helped invent the cult of the celebrity image. In these pages, reproduced here for the first time, you will enter a fabulous and surreal party where Tallulah Bankhead rubs shoulders with a bust of Voltaire and a portrait of Stravinsky, and where Beaton's first trip on the Queen Mary coincides with Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

Close presents 120 portraits of the world's most famous and influential people across the arts and entertainment industries, politics, business and sport―from Julia Roberts and Adele, to Frank Gehry and Marina Abramovic, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer.

In this landmark photographic study, Martin Schoeller uses his distinctive close-up portrait style to examine 40 sets of identical twins, capturing every subtle aspect of their facial structure and expressions.