Close-Up

A close-up in photography is an image made at short range, so that the subject or a fragment of it fills most of the frame and is cut off from its surroundings. The term came from early cinema, where by the 1910s it named a shot that enlarged a face or object on screen. In still photography it became a defining device of interwar modernism. Paul Strand made sharply focused close-ups of machine parts, plants and rocks from around 1920, while Albert Renger-Patzsch's The World is Beautiful and Karl Blossfeldt's Art Forms in Nature, both published in 1928, presented magnified plants and objects as studies of form. László Moholy-Nagy classed magnified views as "intensified seeing" among his varieties of photographic vision.

Close-up work requires focusing nearer than a standard lens allows, using supplementary close-up lenses rated in diopters, extension tubes or bellows, or macro lenses. Depth of field narrows sharply at short range, so photographers often stop down and work from a tripod, as members of Group f/64 did in their studies of natural forms, or use the thin plane of focus to isolate one area. Controlled, directional light models relief and surface texture. Typical subjects include leaves, seed heads, shells, vegetables, machine parts and fragments of the body, often placed against a plain ground. Edward Weston's shells and his Pepper series of 1927–1930, made with an 8×10 view camera, render ordinary organic forms as sculptural volumes.

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay "Little History of Photography" gave magnified views their most cited theoretical framing, arguing that lenses and enlargements disclose an "optical unconscious" of structure and detail beyond ordinary perception. Surrealism took up the same capacity differently. In 1933 the periodical Minotaure published Brassaï's photographs of rolled bus tickets, soap and toothpaste anonymously under the heading Sculptures involontaires, with Salvador Dalí as artistic director of the series, so that tight framing made everyday debris read as accidental sculpture. Close-up overlaps with Macro but is broader, since macro photography is defined by reproduction ratios near or above life size. It also extends beyond Close-Up Portraiture, which confines the same tight framing to the face.