Chuck Close

Josh Sampson

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is a New Yorker who is renowned for focusing on faces and portraits. The highly polished surface of this particular portrait presents Lorna Simpson’s face emerging from the shadows, shimmering from silver tones. Chuck has restricted the focal area so that her left eye is caught while the rest of her face seems to fall away in a haze.Chuck Close says that ‘the closer you look, the more you see’, which is what I wanted to achieve when taking my photographs.

My WorkWith Chuck Close’s work in mind, I attempted to replicate his work by taking some pictures myself with help from a friend of mine. This is shown on the bottom right of the page, where I have used Photoshop to to turn it into black and white as well as adjusting the brightness levels and saturation levels, (I took a screen shot of when I was using Photoshop which can be seen at the bottom of the page). While taking the photographs, an artificial light was held below the face to create an atmosphere within the image and to help show key facial details. The image on the bottom left of the page is the original photograph I took before placing it into Photoshop and therefore helps us to the editing comparison between the two images.