Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]

 The initial interest in the photograph in the first place as a source was the frustration that I had felt as a student in working from my head, which tended to be cluttered with other people’s images. 
 She didn’t seem to know how to be just Cindy—was quite uncomfortable with the idea. Finally for the profile, I said, “Imagine you’re the Queen of England on a postage stamp.” (On photographing Cindy Sherman) 
 ... I think that while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It is the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s. A recognized signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve... Photography is not an easy medium. It is, finally, perhaps the hardest of them all. 
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