Chuck Close

a composition of 5 unique large-format Polaroid Polacolor prints, signed, titled, dated, and numbered 'I' in ink in the margin, affixed to a mount with pushpins, framed, 1979

Amherst, University of Massachusetts, Herter Art Gallery, Fantasies, Fables, and Fabrications: Photo-Works from the 1980's, November - December 1987, and traveling to 6 other venues through 1989

San Francisco, The Friends of Photography, Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography, May - July 1999, and traveling to 11 other venues through 2007

Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography (The Friends of Photography, 1999), p. 2 (this object)

These trimmed Polaroid prints are in generally excellent condition. The colors appear rich and saturated with no apparent fading. There are tack holes in the corners of the prints, and minor soiling in the margins of the 2 uppermost prints.
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The unique large-scale composition offered here represents one of Chuck Close's earliest efforts with the 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera.  He made this work in 1979, when he was first invited by Kathy Halbreich, director of the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to use Polaroid's large-format camera.  Close's experience with this camera fundamentally changed his view of photography, which heretofore had maintained a vital but subordinate role in his artistic process.  With the 20-by-24 images, Close found himself as a photographer and began producing photographs that were meant to stand alone as finished works of art.  Some of the Polaroids were conceived as singular works, while others were combined into multi-image compositions. 

Aside from the notable exceptions of Cindy Sherman and Lucas Samaras, few artists have explored self-portraiture, to such great effect, as Close.  From the very start of his career, he has served as his own subject throughout his oeuvre, in paintings, drawings, prints, paper-pulp constructions, daguerreotypes, and other hybrid media.  It is a preoccupation that persists to the current day.  Siri Engberg writes that in Close's career-long concentration on self-portraiture 'we see not only a single face changing over time but also witness an artist's evolution in his constant quest to reinvent the means by which an image can be built, always pushing the pictorial possibilities of the photographic essence' (Chuck Close: Self Portraits, 1967-2005, p. 119). 

The present composition demonstrates not only Close's persistent dedication to craft, but his full embrace of the photographic medium.