Decades before HD televisions penetrated every home in America, Chuck Close produced photographs staggering in their high-definition vividness, often with little more than a Polaroid camera and artistic gusto at his disposal. The NSU Art Museum’s “Chuck Close Photographs,” a comprehensive survey of the New York artist’s restless, career-long grapple with the medium and its offshoots, offers 86 images dating back more than 50 years. Absorbing yourself in the exhibition is like listening to a composer’s variations on a theme: Close’s being the human face, in all of its complexity and simplicity, distinction and sameness, wildness and predictability.
Though Close shot many of his subjects in profile or at an angle, the quintessential Close portrait—or “head,” as he called them early on—is a face staring directly at the viewer in front of a blank background, an act of inherent confrontation. Close has spoken of photography’s ability to “fix a detail that the human eye could not record.” Indeed, his photographs invite an almost dermatological scrutiny of facial minutiae that, if studied so closely on a public street, would earn a slug to the nose or a four-letter request.
Note, in his famous piece “Phil” (that would be Close’s friend Philip Glass, before he achieved notoriety as a composer) the subject’s creased forehead, his stubble, the bags under his eyes, the single askew hair in his eyebrow. In “Stanley,” the face’s outsized, almost aviator glasses dwarf his beady eyes, and in “Joe,” it’s hard to look at anything except for the man’s unruly cowlick. “Bob,” taken in the late 1970s, is a product of the subject’s time—buck-toothed, mop-topped and still sporting Buddy Holly glasses after they went out of fashion but before they came into fashion again.
Close’s photos are, among other things, time capsules of the era in which they were shot, providing uncritical assessments of the period’s eyewear, hairstyles and dental care. Then there’s the expressions his figures project. Some offer half-smiles, skepticism or mild anxiety, but the best ones are emptied of mental baggage, representing one of those rare split seconds when they are between thoughts. This, too, goes a long way in defining the images as objective documents, stripped of their creator’s opinion.
The exhibit makes little distinction between the private and public figures who have sat for Close over his half-century career: All received the same treatment and hyper-particular sense of detail, down to every pore on their skin. That said, his image of a decidedly pre-presidential Hillary Clinton, circa 1999, is stirring in its confidence and magnetism; not even the marketing team for her current campaign has produced an image of the candidate that is this aesthetically pleasing. A portrait of Bill T. Jones (pictured above) likewise stresses his best attributes, his face and chest contoured, chiseled, as streamlined as his choreography.
And then, just like that, the exhibit takes an adult turn, away from faces and toward the flowers and nudes that would, for a time, seduce the artist. Ironically the flora carries a more sexual charge. Even Georgia O’Keeffe would marvel at the reproductive subtext of his vivider-than-life diptych “Anthurium” (pictured below), with the flower’s phallic spadix protruding from the center of heart-shaped, sanguine petals. Full-figure nudes of men and women, divided into triptychs or more, slice the bodies into de-eroticized segments, but staring at them still makes spectators feel a bit like voyeurs.
These were departures for Close, bumps on an otherwise consistent road through the human face—each “head,” for Close, an opportunity for artistic exploration, reproduction and reinvention, on formats ranging from daguerreotypes and Woodburytpes to tapestry and painting. His achievements are all the more impressive when you realize he’s made most of them while enduring a series of challenges: attention-deficit disorder, face blindness and a spinal artery collapse that has left him paralyzed since 1988.
The NSU exhibition mentions none of these ailments, focusing entirely on Close’s transcendent corpus. But they are worth noting. Speaking about photography, Close has said that while it’s the easiest medium to produce an accidental masterpiece, it’s the “hardest medium in which to have a distinctive personal vision.” If he had stopped in, say, 1975, he would have already achieved one; that he’s still innovating, despite his disadvantages, is nothing short of an inspiration.
“Chuck Close Photographs” runs through Oct. 2 at NSU Art Museum, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Admission costs $5-$12. Call 954/525-5000 or visit nsuartmuseum.org.