The daguerreotype is as old as photography. Invented in the 1830s, it was the favorite mode of portraiture for mid-19th-century bourgeoisie, who posed in front of ersatz classical architecture dressed in their Sunday best. Today daguerreotypes are mostly regarded as historical artifacts and family heirlooms. The painter Chuck Close has provocatively reframed them as contemporary art.
Chuck Close. Self-Portrait/Five Part. 2009. Jacquard tapestry. Private Collection. Image courtesy of... [+]
As a portraitist, Close has relied on photography since the 1960s. Photographs have served as studies for his monumental "heads", affording him a means of transposing an instant in his sitters' lives onto canvases painted over months.
The juxtaposition of immediacy and deliberation is a crucial source of visual tension in his work, as is the interplay between photographic objectivity and painterly subjectivity. "I think of the camera as a way of seeing," Close has said. The camera is the perceptual apparatus of an artist whose work is fundamentally about the act of looking.
Photography has also become an important medium in its own right for Close, as can be seen in a groundbreaking retrospective organized by the Parrish Art Museum – and currently at the Henry Art Gallery – the first exhibition to focus exclusively on his photographs. Close has experimented with Polaroids and holograms (as well as printing techniques such as photogravure) , investigating the ways in which faces and bodies are seen through different lenses and diverse chemical and mechanical processes.
However, Close's most radical investigation of photography has taken place on small sheets of silver-plated copper. While his daguerreotypes are completely traditional in terms of materials and size, his use of high-power strobe lights has allowed him to work unlike any daguerreotypist in history.
The extraordinary detail that daguerreotypes uniquely capture has always been compromised by the lengthiness of exposure. The brightness of Close's strobe makes daguerreotypy instantaneous. The viewer's eye is overloaded with visual information, presented at an intimate scale. As you get close, you perceive how much you cannot see in life.
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