A new book by Brigitte Lacombe

While on assignment at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival for Elle, Brigitte Lacombe, then a fledgling photographer, met Dustin Hoffmann and Donald Sutherland who invited her to the sets of All the President's Men and Fellini's Casanova. The meeting started Lacombe's remarkable career photographing what she calls "a cinema of exception." Exceptional too are Lacombe's spare but emotionally probing portraits of film and stage personalities in cinema/theater, published in 2001, a compilation of her magazine work and her seven-year stint as staff photographer of The Lincoln Center.

Lacombe has a new book from Steidl, anima/persona, a collection of favorite portraits of actors, artists, directors, politicians, writers, and musicians. Charlie Rose talks with Lacombe about the book and her process in the video below. Towards the end of the interview, a special treat: Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Charlie Rose interviews Brigitte Lacombe

Intimacies

Je t'aime in the shadows, Berkeley, California, October 2007.

In the age of the video scandal, where privately recorded intimacies become lurid public spectacle, it takes art to restore context to the intimate image.

Photographers have used the private image, both erotic and familial, to mine their personal and sexual relationships for meaning. Noboyushi Araki has relentlessly photographed every intimate sexual detail of his life and his many lovers, and the seamy underside of Tokyo's underground sex and bondage culture. His themes of sex, life and death challenge social taboos with their use of the visual language of fetishistic pornography. German fashion photographer Juergen Teller, a friend of Araki's, is also a visual diarist, turning to his wife, child and (very often) naked self to create images that are as sexually frank as they are funny. Nan Goldin, recipient of the 2007 Hasselblad Genius Award, has been called the Robert Frank of the 1980s for her depiction of the attitudes and sexual mores of her generation. In Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she chronicled her personal and sexual relationships with her circle of friends and lovers in the age of AIDS, a groundbreaking work that broke social taboos. Donna Ferrato's Love & Lust is equally provocative. Ostensibly about the sub-culture of sex clubs, it is equally about Ferrato's quest to explore the limits of her own sexuality.

In Living with His Camera, Jane Gallop writes about what it's like to live under the constant gaze of the camera of Dick Blau, an art photographer that she has been living with for more than twenty years and the father of her children. Blau's ever-present camera recorded every nuance of their family life, private, eventful and mundane: "The Leica is a camera for bed and breakfast, pajamas and toast," Gallop observes wryly. "As long as I've known Dick, there's been a Leica around." For Gallop, the cover photo of her sweeping the floor naked, observed by but oblivious to Gallop's camera, is both symbol and parody of the "stock representations of domestic life . . . both serious and a joke."

Above all, the intimate photograph can reveal the threads of love, affection and complexity that bind family members, spouses and lovers, as seen most beautifully in the work of Israeli photographer Elinor Carucci. Winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2001, Carucci started photographing her family at the age of 15. In her portfolio, Closer, she assembles portraits of herself and her family that are remarkable not only for their visceral sensuality, but for the unblinking trust she elicits from every member of her family. Carucci's lens literally zooms into the pores of her family's flesh. In a series of macro portraits so close they resemble abstractions, she photographs marks and creases on skin left by pillows, bedsheets or zippers; stitches on her husband's wounded finger; nipple hair being plucked by tweezers; her mother's eye, held wide-open by a Revlon eyelash curler that resembles the torture device in A Clockwork Orange. Together, the individual photographs create a group portrait of a very specific, idiosyncratic family unlike any other, rendered with knowingness and care. "I can't show intimacy in any general way, if there is such a thing as general intimacy," Carucci says. "I can only say something universal about intimacy through actual intimacy. Mine. The actual relationships I have with specific people. With these people that I love."




Noboyushi Araki, From Tokyo Lucky Hole.
Juergen Teller, From Do You Know What I Mean.
Nan Goldin, Couple in bed, Chicago, 1977.
Donna Ferrato, Worshiping Marlena, Lifestyles, Palm Sptings, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, Eran and I, 1998.
Elinor Carucci, My father and I, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, My mother and I, 2000.
Elinor Carucci, Eran and I, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, Wedding rings, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, Mother is worried, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, My mother's back, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, Mom hugs dad, 1994.
Elinor Carucci, Eran almost touches me, 1999.

Hopperesque

Edith and the Kingpin, Oakland, July 2007.

The influence of Edward Hopper on how we see things is so profound that his name has become an adjective: "Hopper," according to English writer Geoff Dyer, "has come to evoke a real place that looks like a Hopper as often as it refers to an actual painting."

The "Hopper look," represented famously in Nighthawks, has been quoted time and again in movies to telegraph loneliness, shadowy isolation or the seemingly interminable passing of time, perhaps most memorably in film noir and the films of Wim Wenders: Million Dollar Hotel, The End of Violence, and Don't Come Knocking, which Wenders called "a tribute to my favorite painter."

Hopper's influence on photography is equally vast. Edward Hopper & Company, edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel, is the catalog of a recent San Francisco exhibition that demonstrates the spirit of Hopper in the works of eight masters of photography: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore.

The photographs below are from the exhibition; the paintings are not (the gallery used other paintings and drawings from its collection). Fraenkel pointedly states in his preface that none of these photographers sought to imitate Hopper in any way; these pictures are not pastiche. Some of them, he said, would actually be surprised to find themselves included in the exhibition.

Perhaps no one more so than Walker Evans. Evans' early works from the 1930s have been compared to Hopper's architectural landscapes for having the same "airless nostalgia for the past." Evans has denied the influence, and claims that he was not aware of Hopper or his work at the time. But Dyer is skeptical. "There is no getting away from or avoiding [Hopper]," he said. "To see his pictures is to begin to inhabit them. You see them everywhere even when you are not looking at them." And that pretty much sums up Hopper's invisible but lingering legacy for all photographers.

Walker Evans, Main Street Block, Selma, Alabama, 1936.

Lee Friedlander, Las Vegas, 1970.

Stephen Shore, JJ Summer's Agency, Duluth, MN, 1973.

Robert Frank, Santa Fe, Mexico, 1955.

Diane Arbus, Lady in a rooming house parlor, NY, 1963.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968.


Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders, From "The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty"
Donata Wenders, Still shot from "Don't Come Knocking"

THE PAINTINGS:
Nighthawks, 1942. Early Sunday Morning, 1930. A Woman in the Sun, 1961. Drugstore, 1927. Gas, 1940. Hotel by a Railroad, 1952. Night Windows, 1928.