Close-Up, Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography

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The latest in The Fruitmarket Gallery's series of group exhibitions guest-curated by scholars, writers and artists, Close-Up explores the defamiliarising effects of bringing a camera lens very close to its subject. Trans-historical and cross-generational, the exhibition brings together selected experiments in close-up film and photography from mid-19th century microscopy to avant-garde film and photography from the 1920s and 1930s; post-war conceptual art; and contemporary art from the 1990s and 2000s. Salvador Dalà ­, whose film Un chien andalou, made with Luis Buà ±uel in 1929, includes unnerving close-ups of a Death's Head Hawk Moth as well as the famous opening sequence showing the slitting of a woman's eye, characterised the revelatory aspect of close-up photography as ‘the registering of an UNKNOWN REALITY'. This exhibition presents a succession of unknown realities from 19th-century lantern slides showing hugely magnified micro-organisms to Simon Starling's double slide work Inventar-Nr. 8573 (Man Ray) 4m — 400nm of 2006, a journey right into the silver gelatin surface of a vintage Man Ray photograph.