For Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie, People Are Portraits Waiting to Happen
When curator Helen Molesworth introduced Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, the new International Center of Photography’s inaugural portraiture exhibition, she expressed her admiration for the photographers and their subjects with loving deference: “Artists are gods to me.”
The ICP’s most recent show on Essex Street takes the form of a soaring modernist monument, all plate glass, matte steel, and slate gray concrete, a brutalist church fit for the worship of the relatively contemporary medium it presents. In Face to Face, housed in the museum’s towering nave, creative titans are transformed into idols by Dean, Lacombe, and Opie. An imperious, crisp-collared Fran Lebowitz hangs to the right of Eileen Myles. Lacombe and Opie’s larger-than-life portraits of Hilton Als, each vastly different but equally striking, sit side by side on the exhibition’s second floor. Though the scale and subjects are lofty, the exhibition is grounded by the intimacy of the portraits and their presentation. The majority of the wall text is composed solely of quotes from the subjects, many of whom are close collaborators and friends of the artists. Now collaborators and friends themselves, Lacombe and Opie sat down together on the morning of Face to Face’s star-studded opening to discuss exercising control in portraiture, their early forays into photography, and the subjects they never got to shoot.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Interview Magazine website.
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