Face to Face, New York review — female photographers get under the skin

Catherine Opie’s photo portrait of the critic Hilton Als casts him as a regal man of letters, reclining in the spotlight as if that were the only civilised way to get any thinking done. A white shirt-front flows from beard to waist, and a pen glints in the breast pocket of his seersucker jacket. All around is the darkness he means to dispel with his mind; only the hands, knotted together in the shadows, hint at the struggle involved. Beholding this image, you might conclude that Opie has distilled something essential about the man: the writer as oracle.

Yet a second portrait of him, by Brigitte Lacombe, reveals a whole other character. The lens rushes to meet Als’s glowing face as it emerges from a featureless white background. This time, he seems to generate his own light. A wide, gap-toothed smile, three-day stubble and eyes lit with contagious joy suggest a different archetype, the critic as enjoyer.

Who is this person, really? It’s a question that photo-portraitists dangle in front of their own noses, drawing them into a belief that if they can only be patient, astute and quick enough, they can discover the answer and fix it on a glossy square of paper. Yet neither of these photos in the International Center of Photography’s excellent new exhibition Face to Face in New York offers us the authentic Als, possibly because such a thing does not exist. Humans are slippery creatures, darting from one state of mind to another faster than a shutter can open and close, and so any frozen image is almost always a falsification.

The veteran curator Helen Molesworth has gathered a trio of portraitists — Opie, Lacombe and Tacita Dean — who take pictures of other artists. Many of their sitters — Richard Avedon, David Hockney, John Waters, Kara Walker and others — are practised image-makers; they understand the power of pose, light, gesture and framing. They know that they are in the hands of fellow pros, but even so there’s a quiet struggle for control going on under the surface. Is that Hockney’s Hockney we’re looking at, or another party’s commentary?

Photographers like to cast themselves as a cross between panther and psychologist, ready to pounce on an insight as soon as the mask falls. “It is the sitter’s mind that controls the portrait a photographer makes, not the photographer’s skills with his camera or with direction,” Philippe Halsman once said. Molesworth tacitly demolishes such pieties. There’s no unmasking. In her show’s world, the person with the camera holds the power. The subject, however dignified or assertive, is no more than a mouse batted about by a cat.

Opie, Lacombe and Dean are all highly skilled cats — “women of a certain age”, as Molesworth describes them — who are not about to relinquish any more control than they have to. For that reason, and because they have distinctive sensibilities, they get dramatically different results.

Walker, like Als, appears more than once in the show. Opie goes for sepulchral seriousness, etching her profile in light against an inky ground. The form invokes the artist’s signature silhouettes, which pantomime America’s tragic history of race relations. But Opie also uses a similarly dramatic technique in her portraits of film director Waters, painter Glenn Ligon and curator Thelma Golden, all members of her personal pantheon. There are standards for depicting deities, and Opie’s are firm: dark ground, unmet gaze and lofty isolation.

Lacombe takes a much more natural approach to Walker, who poses in front of a wall festooned with drawings-in-progress. She meets the photographer’s gaze, cupping her throat with one hand in a self-conscious, protective gesture. The casual yet stylish outfit (black T-shirt, black jeans, black trainers) makes her look disarmingly ordinary, not at all a towering figure of the international art world. Lacombe has achieved a casual intimacy with her subject . . . or the illusion of intimacy, anyway.

She has developed that studied informality over decades of shooting illustrious individuals and making them look as if they felt comfortable in front of the camera. Rather than usher sitters into her studio, she works on location, apparently accommodating her subjects’ vision of themselves. Joan Jonas perches on the bed in her luminous New York apartment, looking askance at one snooty dog while the other cuddles humbly by her side. Lee Bontecou stands at the centre of her Pennsylvania studio, slouching amiably beneath a sculpture that dangles from the ceiling like a bolt of revelation. A gnomic Louise Bourgeois, wearing an elaborate velvet costume, smiles mischievously and plays with her pigtails.

Lacombe manages all these idiosyncrasies the way she manages light, neatly corralling them into her black-bordered square frame. She’s an expert at humanising mythic figures, and while they’re busy crafting the down-to-earth version of themselves or guarding against too much revelation, she turns them all into perfectly recognisable Lacombes.

Dean, the third artist in Molesworth’s dynamic trio, uses time and persistence to make herself disappear. A tireless camera sits still, recording days as they unfold. We see Hockney in his studio smoking, Hockney reading, Hockney with his back to the lens. The sequence turns the viewer into a potted plant with eyes, impassively watching from a corner of the room and utterly cut off from the great man’s personality or inner life.

Instead of standing by to catch the unguarded moment or the confessional flash, Dean relies on the accumulation of detail to tell a story about people. In One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, a filmed conversation between the 99-year-old painter Luchita Hurtado and her 49-year-old colleague Julie Mehretu, the camera wanders over coffee mugs, wrinkled hands and books. All the marginalia supplements Hurtado’s tangled filaments of wisdom and gossip, which Mehretu absorbs with an ingratiating smile. In the end, we remember the decor better than the dialogue.

A small companion show, Between Friends, complements Face to Face. Instead of the formal relationships of the portrait-sitting, we get snapshots of artists by artists, many of them disarmingly candid. Walker Evans caught James Agee in 1937 looking like he just fell out of bed, hair tousled and eyes magically alight through a sleepy squint. The up-close, off-centre, spontaneous picture, so unlike Evans’ polished public style, captures a moment of genuine communion between friends.

So does Ansel Adams’ image of Georgia O’Keeffe hoisting a cow’s head and skeleton in a lunar southwestern terrain. We can barely make out her shadowed face beneath a wide-brimmed hat as she bends to grip the bones, but we know there’s something urgent and special about this trophy. Adams usually strove for perfect prints of sublime landscapes; O’Keeffe had the instincts of a movie star. Yet here we see them as they really were, revelling awkwardly in the heat of the day, the warmth of their friendship and the pleasure of a lucky find.

Both shows to May 1, icp.org