Chuck Close

1. Chuck Close
Josh Sampson

2. 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.

3. My Work
With 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.