New York artist Chuck Close has spent four decades representing the human face in a myriad of mediums. In depicting the countenances of family members and friends, though, he has been as interested in "notions of perception, scale, structure, realism, and abstraction" #&151;to quote ARTnews—as he has been with more traditional portraiture concerns. In this photograph taken on the eve of his 1998 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Close examines a self-portrait print. Despite suffering a collapsed spinal artery that partially paralyzed him in 1988, Close has continued to create likenesses that probe the very idea of representation.

Jason Schmidt (born 1969)
Gelatin silver print, 1998
Published April 1998
Jason Schmidt
©Jason Schmidt