Chuck Close: The 2014 Hollywood Portfolio

The Top Photography Posts of 2012 (Part 1)

The year 2012 is about to draw to a close, so it's fitting to look back through the past 12 months and see what viewers have been looking for in photography and the visual arts. While this blog features different photographic styles and mediums, most of the popular posts seem to share a common theme. Here then are the top photography posts of 2012.


10) Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein - The Different Body Types of Olympic Athletes

Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein collaboration on athletes from different Olympic events is an eye opening presentation on the beauty and marvel that is the human body. One portrait on one athlete from one event can already make for a great image, but the variety presented by the photographers just goes to show amazing human are when it comes to physical adaptations. Truly, photography series was a fitting entry in time for the 2012 London Olympics.


9) Chuck Close - Not So Typical Daguerreotypes

Chuck Close's use of the century-old photography technique called the daguerreotype process proved to be a refreshing introduction into the medium. Following the same pattern as his gigantic paintings, Close's daguerreotypes are close-ups of his artists friends. He also made portraits of a few celebrity faces, but the daguerreotype process he used presented these familiar faces in a new light.


8) Sally Mann - The Beauty of Family

Sally Mann's beautiful black-and-white portraits of her immediate family have been a topic of conversation for photographers and artists ever since she published these photographs. No doubt the controversial nature of photographing her nude children helped bring her to the spotlight, but after all the hubbub and racket, her intimate portraits are worthy of the highest praise.


7) Martin Schoeller - Up Close and Personal

Martin Schoeller's dramatic close-ups have been featured on magazine covers and posters around the world. The photographer has used his unique style to capture everyone from female bodybuilders to tiny twins, but it's his celebrity portraits that have made him famous. Schoeller's use of hard light and shallow depth-of-field highlights every nook and cranny of his celebrity sitters, making them instantly captivating.


6) Platon - The Power of the Portrait

Platon's portraits are also quite dramatic, but in a different way. As with Chuck Close and Martin Schoeller, Platon uses extreme close-ups to present familiar faces in a new way, but his style is more subdued than Schoeller, and more modern than Close. Platon uses the same philosophy as Henri Cartier-Bresson in that he waits for that perfect moment before clicking the shutter. Based on his portraits, he's found that perfect moment every single time.


These five entries make up the tail-end of the top photography posts of 2012. Interestingly enough, most of them feature photographers who specialize in studio portraits, and three out of the five use extreme close-ups for their work, a technique that has proven popular in the last decade, especially for magazine covers and the like. Check back in a few days for the top five entries of the year.

Chuck Close: Daguerreotype Portrait of Kara Walker

A good portrait should reveal answers about the person, yet leave enough room for more questions. In some cases, the old ways become exciting methods for producing refreshing images and themes. A good example of this is Chuck Close's daguerreotype portrait of Kara Walker.

Chuck Close is one of the most prominent portrait artists of this generation. He is famed for his extremely large canvas paintings of people's faces, using varying grid and pixel methods to create smaller artworks in the larger portrait. Despite having prospagnosia (face blindness) and having suffered a seizure which left his arms and legs weakened, he continues to produce artworks on the same scale. Over the last decade, he has experimented with different forms of photography, with most of his famous photographs done with the daguerreotype process.

This particular portrait is a collaboration between Close and his artist friend Kara Walker, known for her work dealing with race, sexuality and identity. Walker poses in profile and is captured in silhouette, a more common form of portraiture in the 19th century. Close used daguerreotype photography, of the earliest photographic processes over a century old which involves long preparation, exposure and developing times.

The end result of these artists experimenting with old processes is a beautifully haunting profile portrait in the shadows, the outline of Walker's shoulders and head clearly visible, with the bare minimum amount of light showing enough detail on her face. For this 2007 portrait, Close was awarded the 2nd prize in the Portraits category of the World Press Photo.

For more on Chuck Close, check out this previous entry on him and his not so typical daguerreotypes. Time magazine has a good profile on Kara Walker. To find out more about the daguerreotype process, have a look at Louis Daguerre, the father of photography.

Louis Daguerre: The Father of Photography

When looking at the beginnings of photography, diffierent arguments can be made as to who invented the first camera or who shot the first photograph. Sufficient evidence can be presented however, in favor of the pioneering inventors who first made photography available to the greater public. If ever there was a Father of Photography, Louis Daguerre would have a rightful claim to that title.

Louis Daguerre was an accomplished artist, working in the fields of architecture, theater and painting. Before his foray into photography, Daguerre was more well known for the diorama which he helped invent. It was only in 1829 that the inventor partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, another inventor who pioneered some of the earliest photographic processes, specifically the heliograph.

The heliographic process was able to record scenic impressions using plates coated with bitumen. Unfortunately, the exposure time lasted several hours or even days, something which Daguerre tried to improve on. After Niépce passed away in 1833, Daguerre shifted his attention to silver salts, compounds that were used by the chemist Johann Heinrich Schulze. Using light-sensitive silver iodide liquid to coat a glass plate, Daguerre could record images similar to the heliograph.

Just like the heliograph however, exposure times could take several hours. Through a serendipitous discovery, Daguerre found out that mercury vapor could record a fleeting image on the plate. The inventor then "fixed" the image with warm salt water. This process of exposing, developing and fixing an image became the de facto method of commercial photography from the earliest daguerreotypes to modern photographic film (dropped only quite recently in favor of digital methods).

While the daguerreotype cut down exposure times significantly, the earliest tools and chemicals used still required several minutes for one exposure. For example, in the daguerreotype above of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, the streets and sidewalks are bare save for two people on the lower left-hand corner: a gentleman and a shoe shiner, both of whom stood in the same position long enough to be recorded on the 10-minute long exposure. This image is also being touted as the earliest photograph with a recognizable human being in it.

Daguerre initially tried to attract private investors in his invention, but his efforts failed. The inventor went public in 1839, presenting his process to the Académie des sciences. The presentation was a success, and some academy members subsequently helped Daguerre secure a lifetime pension for himself and Niépce's nephew through the French government. The daguerreotype process was then presented as a gift from France to the world for free, with the details and instructions published without fee.

Daguerre's biggest competitor during this period of discovery was Henry Fox Talbot who invented the calotype. The calotype was different in that in involved a light-sensitive paper treated with silver chloride. Exposure time with calotypes were also relatively short because only a faint image was required at first; the full image could be developed later with special chemicals on the paper "negative". Because the paper could hold the image and transfer it to a "positive image" print, multiple copies of an image could be made from only one exposure.  This potentially made it easier to market than the daguerreotype, which only produced one copy per exposure.

Talbot, hoping to make a profit from his invention, licensed the calotype to interested parties. Unfortunately, this strategy backfired as the daguerreotype was free to produce; those who wanted to make a calotype had to pay Talbot a royalty fee. This inevitably led to the daguerreotype being the first popular photographic process in the world.

The daguerreotype gradually declined in popularity around the 1860s in favor of simpler and less cumbersome photography methods such as the tintype and the ambrotype. Some modern artists such as Chuck Close and Jerry Spagnoli have pioneered a revival of the old process, and many daguerreotype enthusiasts can now be found all over the world.

The Wikipedia pages on Louis Daguerre and daguerreotype have more information on the Father of Photography and the pioneering photography process. For a modern take on the daguerreotype, check out artist Chuck Close's work. Some books on the subject include Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital and Young America: The Daguerreotypes Of Southworth & Hawes.