50 Celebrities, 10 Years, One Room: Inside Mark Seliger’s Iconic Vanity Fair Oscar Portraits

For years, one of the most interesting things happening on Oscar night wasn’t on the red carpet at all. It was hidden away behind a curtain, inside a small, carefully built studio at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. While cameras outside chased spectacle, inside, Mark Seliger was doing something much quieter—and arguably more revealing.

Since 2014, he’s been photographing actors, directors, and unexpected guests in a space designed from scratch each year. There was no big production, no overthinking—just people stepping in for a few minutes after one of the biggest nights of their lives. The result? Portraits that feel less like celebrity photos and more like glimpses of who these people actually are when everything else fades out.

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Every year, the studio was reimagined from the ground up. In collaboration with a set designer, a completely new concept took shape—planned for months, then built in just two days. What started as an ordinary Beverly Hills parking lot was transformed almost overnight into an 18-by-30-foot cinematic space, with each year featuring its own distinct mood, textures, and visual language.

Stepping inside, and everything shifted. The noise of the night faded, replaced by something more controlled, more intentional. Within this carefully crafted environment, celebrities could drop the formality of the Oscars and step into something looser, more personal. There were no over-rehearsed poses, no press lines—just a brief moment to play, experiment, and exist outside the spotlight. And in that small window, something unexpectedly real began to surface.

Over time, the project became more than a portrait session. It evolved into an unofficial archive of Hollywood, one built not on headlines or awards, but on subtle, human moments. Oscar winners still clutching their statues, rising stars caught mid-overwhelm, familiar faces suspended somewhere between exhaustion and adrenaline, all preserved in a way that feels both intimate and timeless.

We’ve put together 50 portraits from across a decade of this project, moments where Hollywood, even for a second, let the performance slip and something more real came through. These aren’t the images shaped by red carpet expectations or public personas, but glimpses in between—quieter, less guarded, and far more revealing. Taken together, they form a rare kind of record, not just of who was there, but of the fleeting, in-between moments that usually go unseen.