Close-Up Portraiture

Close-up portraiture is a mode of portrait photography in which the sitter's head and face fill most or all of the frame, leaving little room for body or setting. In photography the approach is usually traced to Julia Margaret Cameron, often credited with the medium's first close-ups. From late 1865 she used a camera taking 15 by 12 inch glass negatives to make large, tightly framed heads, including portraits of Sir John Herschel and Thomas Carlyle in 1867. The approach gained new currency in Weimar Germany, where photobooks such as Helmar Lerski's Everyday Heads (1931) and Erich Retzlaff's People at Work (1931) used cropping, close viewpoints and sharp focus to present faces as physiognomic evidence.

In practice, framing ranges from a head-and-shoulders view to crops that cut through the forehead and chin or isolate a single feature. Plain backdrops, screens or darkness remove the setting, so that skin, hair, eyes and expression carry the image. Distance shapes the face itself. A wide-angle lens used close up enlarges the nose and forehead, so photographers commonly work from farther back with short telephoto lenses of roughly 85 to 135 millimeters on 35mm cameras, while some exploit the distortion for comic or unsettling effect. Lighting is often directional and sculptural. Lerski, a former film cameraman, shaped faces with sunlight reflected from as many as sixteen mirrors. Large-format negatives and big prints record pores and wrinkles, as in Richard Avedon's frontal portraits made with an 8 by 10 inch view camera against seamless white paper.

Close-up portraiture has long been bound up with physiognomy, the belief that character can be read in the face, and the framing has been used both to support and to undermine that belief. Lerski's Metamorphosis through Light (1936), more than a hundred close-ups of one man under shifting light, made a single sitter appear as many different people. The approach differs from Environmental Framing, which reads a person through surroundings, and narrows Close-Up, the broader term for any tightly framed subject. It often combines with Frontal Composition and Typology in serial work such as Thomas Ruff's Portraits, begun in 1981, whose passport-style heads, enlarged to more than two meters high, show every pore yet reveal little about the sitter.