anima | persona is Brigitte Lacombe’s second book, a collection of revelatory portraits of Bill Clinton, Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan, Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion and many more of her most influential contemporaries. Lacombe’s honest and intelligent photos document artists, writers, directors, actors and political figures in both private and public moments, intimate and theatrical.
In 1975, the young Parisian photographer Brigitte Lacombe met Donald Sutherland and Dustin Hoffman at the Cannes Film Festival; these new acquaintances would go on to open doors for her. That same year she was hired as a photographer for the filming of Fellini's 'Casanova'. Since then, Lacombe's famous images have reflected a who's who of Hollywood cinema. This collection spans a masterfully choreographed array of photographs Lacombe took - all the way from the sets of 1970's cinema classics to film milestones of the new millennium, including Alan J. Pakula's 'All the President's Men', Martin Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York', and Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards'. Conveying a certain intimacy without unmasking any mystery, Lacombe's images capture classical beauty in a way that is fresh and exciting.
Face to Face presents a selection of portraits of artists by three of the most prominent portrait artists of our time. Bringing together the diverse and distinctive work of Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, this book forms an investigation into the charged genre of portraiture and its various approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity. While the three artists collected here share a wide set of historical touchstones, each deploys the camera Dean exploits cinema’s capacity for duration; Lacombe takes her cameras out on assignment; Opie works in the tradition of the studio photograph. Often overlapping in the subjects depicted, Face to Face offers an opportunity to look closely at bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of the seminal thinkers and makers that these artists have encountered across the fields of music, painting, photography, film, and literature, among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many other others. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, the book includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Helen Molesworth, and the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest.