Photographers and Artists, “Face to Face”

The expression “head to head” suggests each intimacy and confrontation, a reckoning of types, no matter its objective or tone. Presently, on the Worldwide Middle of Pictures, the phrase serves because the appropriately expansive title for a three-person exhibition whose focus is the charmed and charged phenomenon of the artist portrait. The beneficiant collection of works, curated by Helen Molesworth, options contributions from the artist-filmmaker Tacita Dean and the photographers Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie. The formidable topics—together with Richard Avedon, Maya Angelou, John Waters, and Patti Smith—are themselves accustomed to holding the reins of illustration, which isn’t to say that they’re not sport, at the least for a second, to let go. Although, in reality, the nuance and depth of the work on view converse extra of engagement than of give up.

The works, largely large-scale, are organized in shut proximity—creating one thing like an imaginary assembly of the minds amongst likenesses—and underscored by wall-label texts that embrace quotations from the topics reflecting on their very own strategies or self-conceptions, like thought bubbles. “Writing is the act of claiming I, of imposing oneself upon different folks . . . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act,” Joan Didion asserts within the textual content accompanying Lacombe’s frontal black-and-white picture of the writer with a wide-eyed gaze, her palms raised to her mouth, as if in gasping response to one thing the photographer has simply stated. “The problem is at all times methods to deal with the way in which mild falls on a black object with out permitting it to destroy the shape, however moderately merely reveal it,” the smiling painter Kerry James Marshall muses within the label for Opie’s “Kerry,” from 2017, wherein Marshall emerges from a black background—or dissolves into it. And phrases are integral to Dean’s piece “One Hundred and Fifty Years of Portray,” from 2021, a looping movie that lingers on the painters Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu as they sit speaking. It’s, maybe, an apt emblem for “Face to Face.” Taken as a complete, the present is an prolonged dialog—conspiratorially murmuring, fruitfully clashing—throughout time and house.

The artists’ topics additionally overlap. David Hockney seems, in his studio, in one among Dean’s uneventful, whirring projections (the 16-mm. movies aren’t transferred to video) and likewise in one among Opie’s studio photos, a part of a long-running portrait sequence of topics set towards moody, black backgrounds. Kara Walker is portrayed in profile by each Opie and Lacombe, in comparable compositions. In every picture, Walker bears roughly the identical expression, however, in Opie’s velvety gloom, she is, per Marshall, merely revealed. Lacombe’s imaginative and prescient of Walker is in another way lovely—amply lit and forthright.