“Everybody got his suntan of 30,000 watts," said Bob Holman today when he described the experience of the subjects photographed by Chuck Close. In making daguerreotypes of his artist friends, Close decided to compress the light that would normally flow into the camera with a two and a half minute exposure into one second by using intense lighting. Close was thus able to marry the highly detailed low depth-of-field black and white images of daguerreotypes with spontaneity of the subject and clarity in the photograph.

Aperture is displaying daguerreotypes, photogravures, pigment prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close through January 4, 2007. The Aperture Foundation has also put out a book A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with photographs by Chuck Close and poetry by Bob Holman.

In a packed room tonight Holman and Close spoke to Lyle Rexer who began the evening with a small presentation on the interaction between poetry and visual art over the past thousand years.

Holman’s poems that go with the images of the books are from the long tradition of praise poems. Holman described these as coming from the African oral tradition where “as long as the dinars flow so does the praise” (I quote from memory) and usually when the dinars stop flowing one sees the “other side of the poem.”

For each of the portraits featured in the exhibition Holman has a poem (and often a different sort of poem). Rexer showed this slide of one of James Siena’s works and Holman said that he had used the topology of a similar work by Siena for the concrete poem he had written to go with Close’s portrait of Siena. For the portrait of James Turrell Holman has a precise numerical poem that captures the idea of a beam of light.

Close said that his interest in daguerreotypes was partly because of their intimacy. Daguerreotypes capture the subject in a mirror image and hence the image is true only for the subject of the photograph. Because of their book like size daguerreotypes must be viewed by single viewers and are visible only from some angles, therefore there is a natural dialog with the viewer that Close said appealed to him.

The most fascinating aspect of the discussion at Aperture tonight was the extent of collaboration between Holman and Close and the subject of the portraits. Both Close and Holman knew the artists featured in the book. Holman spent time with the artists who are portrayed and was an interlocutor during the making of the picture often (as in the case of Siena and Terrell illustrated above) using the very structure of the poem and its graphic to reveal some part of the subject. Close said he doesn’t have people laughing or crying. He tries to be neutral and believes that the face carries visual indications of the lives that these people have led. In his paintings (which are also made from photographs) he has captured pores and surfaces and with his daguerreotypes now he has given us the blemishes and hair follicles of his friends and what he knows about them.