©Catherine Opie, David, 2017. © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

The International Center of Photography (ICP) recently opened Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie fthat will run through May 1, 2023. Organized by writer and curator Helen Molesworth, the exhibition presents portraits created by three of the most prominent contemporary portraitists. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by ICP and MACK, London, with essays by Molesworth and writer and curator Jarrett Earnest.

As Molesworth notes, “Each of these artists has engaged portraiture—a genre of image-making as old as modernity itself—as a means of connecting themselves to other artists. The results are three bodies of work that play with the historical conventions of the genre while nibbling away at its edges.”

Cover of Face to Face, published by ICP and MACK, London

Creating an atmosphere of conversations held just beyond the frame of the images, Face to Face features more than 50 photographs by Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie, and two films by Tacita Dean, with bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of compelling cultural figures including Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Miranda July, Rick Owens, Martin Scorsese, Patti Smith, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, and John Waters, among others. The exhibition presents some of the often-overlapping subjects immortalized by Dean, Lacombe, and Opie and investigates the charged genre of portraiture, one that often carries a sense of intimacy and exposure simultaneously.

“These pictures and films offer us formality and intimacy, patience and curiosity, and the thrill of an unguarded moment,” said curator Helen Molesworth. “I see all three artists involved in making pictures that are not only in dialogue with their given subjects, but also with the history of the genre of portraiture and the medium of photography. Art is many things, but for artists it is a way of talking to each other through pictures. It’s a transhistorical game of stealing and borrowing techniques, paying homage to one another’s triumphs—a constant call and response.”

Helen Molesworth is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles,who has organised monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. Molesworth is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Catherine Opie, Jerome Caja, 1993. © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Catherine Opie is known for her early images of members of the LGBTQ community, using traditional portraiture to bring underrepresented people into the mainstream of contemporary culture. More recently she did a dedicated series of portraits of artists. Photographs by Opie in Face to Face span three decades, from 1993 to 2019, and include images of Justin Bond, Thelma Golden, Miranda July, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Rick Owens among others. Often the sitter does not meet the gaze of the camera, such as the silhouetted view of Kara Walker or a shirtless Lawrence Weiner smoking a cigarette. The results are images of artists plunged into their own thoughts, both solitary, melancholic, and slightly magical.

Catherine Opie, Michèle, 2016. © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Brigitte Lacombe (b. 1950, in Alès, France) is known for her influential and revelatory portraiture. For four decades she has created iconic and intimate photographs of many of the world’s most celebrated artists, actors, politicians and intellectuals. Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Phillips New York; Sotheby’s, London; Qatar Museums, Doha; Shanghai Center of Photography; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; and Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Her books include Lacombe Anima | Persona (Steidl/Dangin, 2009), a retrospective book of photographs from 1975-2008; Lacombe Cinema | Theater (Schirmer/Mosel); Breakthrough Prize, vol. 1, 2012-2016 and Breakthrough Prize, vol. 2, 2017-2019, portraits of top scientists; and Forward 20 Years of TimesTalks, 2019. She is currently at work on a visual memoir. She received the Eisenstaedt Award for Travel Photography (2000), the Lifetime Achievement Award for Photography (Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 2010), and the Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Travel & Portraiture (2012). “Brigitte,” a documentary film by director Lynne Ramsay, commissioned by Miu Miu Women’s Tales, was shown at the Venice and New York Film Festivals in 2019. Her photography has appeared in publications around the world including Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, German Vogue, British Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, “M” Le Monde, Zeit Magazine, and others. Lacombe has worked on many film sets, as well as photographing major theater productions and fashion advertising campaigns. She lives in New York City.

Brigitte Lacombe, Glenn Ligon, New York, NY, 2020. © Brigitte Lacombe, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Brigitte Lacombe, Maya Angelou, New York, NY, 1987. © Brigitte Lacombe, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Brigitte Lacombe, Patti Smith, New York, NY, 2014. © Brigitte Lacombe, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Tacita Dean (b. 1965, Canterbury, England) works primarily in film. She lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, where she was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014- 2015. Dean has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009; the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006; and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Solo exhibitions were recently held in 2022 at MUDAM, Luxembourg, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; in 2021 at Kunstmuseum Basel; in 2020 at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; in 2019 at the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, and at the Serralves Museum, Porto; in 2018 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, as well as The Royal Academy of Arts, London, as part of a trilogy of exhibitions held in conjunction with the city’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. Dean designed the sets and costumes for The Dante Project, a collaborative production with the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor and conductor-composer Thomas Adés. Based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the ballet premiered in October 2021 at the Royal Opera House in London. In 2011 Dean’s work FILM, a part of the Unilever Series of Tate Modern and shown in the Turbine Hall, marked the beginning of the campaign to preserve photochemical film.

Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 2021. © Tacita Dean, Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris , Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP).

Tacita Dean, Portraits, 2016. © Tacita Dean, Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie is on view from January 27, 2023 – May 1, 2023 at The International Center of Photography. The accompanying catalogue is available now from MACK and The International Center of Photography (ICP)..