'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something'

If ever an artist lived up to his name, it's Chuck Close. With the immense photo-realist portraits that made his name in the 1970s, this pioneering painter and photographer brought you closer to the human face than almost any artist in history. Eyes the size of footballs, noses the length of a hockey stick, mouths the length of a baseball bat, and all of them rendered with such a scrupulous, almost preternatural fidelity to the source that it was startling, even unnerving, to look at. This was wide-screen HD in the days before wide-screen HD even existed, and it did just as much to make you reconsider what a face looked like, what a portrait was.

Laguna Gloria Art Museum, the original incarnation of what is now the Austin Museum of Art, was among the earliest museums to show Close's work, and now, more than three decades later, the institution is favoring the city with another solo exhibition of Close-up art. "A Couple of Ways of Doing Something," which opens this weekend at AMOA's Downtown galleries, focuses on work he's done over the past eight years, including 15 daguerreotypes – yes, that oldest of photographic processes – that are each smaller than a sheet of paper.

"The thing I love about daguerreotypes," Close has said, "is that everything I love in photography was already there in the beginning: 1840. The incredible detail. The incredible range, from the brightest highlight of white, sometimes solarized, almost bluish in color, to the deepest, deepest darkest, most velvety blacks. I love the fact that, as opposed to so many photographs that are painting-sized, which 30 people can stand in front of, each daguerreotype requires the active participation of one viewer. It's intimate, one-on-one, personal."

That doesn't mean, though, that Close has abandoned the large-scale format for which he's so well known. The exhibition also features seven 8-by-6-foot digital Jacquard portrait tapestries based on the daguerreotypes. A digital scan of the original is rendered into a computer program for the warp and weft threads, which the loom then processes into a tapestry composed of up to 17,800 colored warp threads.

Close has also used some of the daguerreotypes as the basis for a series of 26½-by-20-inch ink-jet pigment prints. The high-resolution scans allow for the images to be enlarged many times without losing any tonal fidelity or detail.

The 20 digital pigment prints are paired with poems by New York School poet Bob Holman, former host of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poetry slams and now host of the Bowery Poetry Club, who riffs on the personality and style of each photographic subject. (And if you'd prefer to hear Holman reading the poems himself, you can dial up a recording on the free cell-phone audio guide that's part of the exhibition.)

There are also a pair of 47-by-40-inch photogravures, showcasing the late 19th century process of etching a photographic image onto a metal plate. In all, this traveling exhibition, organized by the nonprofit photography advocate Aperture Foundation, offers Austinites an opportunity not only to catch up with Close but to get close to faces in a way that bridge the earliest days of photography with the most recent. That's more than "a couple of ways of doing something" – it's damn near all of them.

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"A Couple of Ways of Doing Something" is on view Aug. 22-Nov. 8 at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org.