The secrets of a portrait

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 8 / November 17 - 23, 2006

Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now

Viewers at the “Least Wanted” exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, above. Two women inspect the woven threads of Chuck Close’s tapestry portrait of photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, below.

By John Ranard

Chuck Close in his exhibition at Aperture Gallery, “A Couple of Ways of Doing Something,” begins his adventure with portrait photography by using the daguerreotype, a photographic process invented in 1839 in France that renders the illusion of a positive image. The photographer places a polished silver plate sensitized to iodine and bromide in a camera, exposes this to light, and develops the latent image with hot mercury. The end result is a reversed image provided by a lens, resting on a mirror-type surface that when held in the hand and tilted to accept viewing light, changes from positive to negative.

Reading a daguerreotype can be a spiritual experience. Because there is no noticeable grain, the process is capable of recording detail so true, Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of its image as “the thing itself.” Parisians, amazed by this new invention, often looked at the image with a magnifying glass, as one inspects a specimen through a microscope.

Close is less interested in the portrait as a document, than how the viewer’s perception of the image changes as the same image is viewed through different mediums. These daguerreotypes are scanned, digitized, woven into tapestries, printed with Epson pigment inks, and etched as photogravures, all in varying sizes. The daguerreotypes are 9 inches by 11 inches, the tapestries, 6½ feet by 8½ feet. One gets the feeling that Close chose the subjects for his portraits — Philip Glass, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Wilson, Bob Holman — not because they represent New York’s influential artists, literati and musicians but because they are his friends and available. The faces are not so important; it is the process that holds his attention, and ours.

By contrast, the power behind the series of portraiture on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, “Least Wanted,” is in the photograph themselves. The images represent the ritual imposed upon everyone arrested — the police mug shot. The photographers — members of the police force — were neither artists nor journalists nor professionally trained photographers. Yet as utilitarian as the photographs may be, each yields all the promise a documentary photograph can deliver. They are rich in emotional detail and excite the imagination of the viewer. The pictures are full of secret meaning that becomes the genesis of a riveting short story, perhaps a novel. These could be taken by Avedon.

Chuck Close, “A Couple of Ways of Doing Something,” at Aperture Gallery, 547 W. 27th St., Nov. 9 to Jan. 4. (Also includes poems by Bob Holman and interview with Close and Holman by Lyle Rexer.)

“Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots,” anonymous mug shots collected by Mark Michaelson, Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 W. 23rd St., Sept. 14 to Oct. 28.