Mark Seliger Built a Studio Inside the Oscars for Eleven Years.
I Miss It Already.

Often, it was the only part of the Academy Awards that I cared to follow.

I've watched what Mark Seliger built inside the Vanity Fair Oscars party every year for over a decade, and not just because the photographs are good. It's because of what he actually built. Not a backdrop. A studio, eighteen by thirty feet, reimagined from scratch every year, constructed in a Beverly Hills parking lot in about two days, then gone by morning. Roughly a hundred actors, directors, and Academy Award winners walked through it on the most adrenalized night of their professional lives, and Seliger had somewhere between five and twenty-five frames to make each one different from the last. Lupita Nyong'o gazing at her first Oscar in 2014. Michelle Yeoh holding hers in 2023 with what Seliger called "grace and agility." Photographs that didn't look like every other photograph from that night, because they weren't taken in the same place as every other photograph from that night.

I pay close attention to that distinction because I spend a lot of my own working life building it. When I plan a shoot for a fashion client, the background isn't decoration and the set isn't an afterthought. It's the difference between handing someone a deliverable and handing them an asset. A lavender background doesn't match a silver sequin blazer. It completes it. That's a small-scale version of what Seliger was doing at a scale most never touch: an entire built environment, designed for one night, in service of one specific kind of photograph that couldn't happen anywhere else at that party.

Which is why it's been a quiet loss that he hasn't set it up the last two years. In 2025, the studio didn't happen. In 2026, under a new editorial director and a rushed move to LACMA's still-unfinished galleries, it didn't happen again (and what replaced it, by most accounts, was a lighting fiasco on the red carpet that had nothing to do with Seliger at all). Nobody's said why the studio itself is gone. I don't know either, and I'm not going to guess. I just know I looked for it this year, the way I do every year, and it wasn't there. So, the Oscars, for me, are a non-event.

An Old Argument, Not a New One

Building an environment instead of accepting a backdrop is an old argument in this medium, not a new one. In 1888, Kodak put a camera in everyone's hands with a slogan that was also an argument: you press the button, we do the rest. The trade press spent the next decade worried that photography would dissolve into undifferentiated snapshot noise. Alfred Stieglitz's answer wasn't to complain that fast and anonymous was bad. His response was to build: the Photo-Secession, the journal Camera Work, the gallery at 291. That made the distinction between an authored photograph and a commodity photograph impossible to ignore. He didn't win that argument by stating it. He won it by making it visible, year after year, until the case made itself.

Seliger's eleven years did the same thing for a different kind of flood. Every Oscar night produces tens of thousands of nearly identical wire-service images — arrivals, step-and-repeats, the same forty actors in the same eight poses, shot by fifty photographers standing in a row. His studio was the one place in that entire evening where a photograph got to be a collaboration instead of a transaction. I recognize that distinction because it's the one I try to build into every shoot I plan, on a much smaller stage than the Oscars.

What Eleven Years Actually Proves

I also teach photographers, for what it's worth, in my own Marketing for Photographers course, that the way you last in this business is by becoming a partner embedded in a client's identity rather than a vendor who has to re-bid every cycle. Seliger is about as good a proof of that strategy as exists in this industry: eleven consecutive years, a published retrospective book, a foreword from the editor-in-chief herself. And the partnership still seems to have ended the moment leadership changed hands, without a word said about it either way. That doesn't mean the strategy is wrong. It means there's no permanent version of it. You make the case again every year, the same way Stieglitz had to, the same way I have to with every client I want to keep.

I hope the studio comes back. Not because the red carpet needs saving (that's a separate, much sillier problem) but because for eleven years, one corner of the most photographed night in entertainment belonged to an actual point of view instead of a wire feed. I'd rather watch for it again next March than get used to it being gone.

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