Faith / Jackie Nickerson

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 differently: 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, Fran Lebowitz, Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many 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