Perhaps literary critic Cyril Connolly was wrong when he observed, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” The coronavirus pandemic was an even bigger foe, forcing museums to close down and people to mask up. So now, with the virus apparently in retreat, there is something life-affirming about a photography exhibition that celebrates famous faces. “In thinking about portraiture I realised, oh, of course I’m looking at all these faces!” says Helen Molesworth, a writer and curator of Face to Face at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. “This is a post-pandemic show. We’ve just come out of the period where we were held apart from one another and we were masked. It made a certain kind of dumb sense to me that I found myself looking at these pictures of people I admired.” The exhibition, which opened last month, features more than 50 photographs by French-born Brigitte Lacombe and US-born Catherine Opie and two films by British-born Tacita Dean. It is a love letter to art and artists 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. There is some overlap in subjects between the three artists, inviting visitors to compare and contrast. For Molesworth,there was also a surprise. Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, she reflects: “The thing I didn’t realise would happen, but did really happen in the space, is that all three of these artists are pre-digital artists who enter their craft during the analogue period. Some of that analogue sensibility is there. “One is very much in the hands of experts in the show. You have three artists past mid-career: they really know what they’re doing. I organised the show on my laptop so it wasn’t until we were in the space with the actual stuff that I realised the degree of craftsmanship that was taking place.” All three featured artists are women but no, Molesworth is not trying to make a statement about representation. “It’s such a tedious situation. I find patriarchy quite boring. I don’t feel like it’s a statement. I certainly feel like these three artists are extraordinary and at the top of their game and no one ever asked any curator for the last 500 years, ‘Gosh, so many men!’ You know what I mean?” The show includes a selection of Lacombe’s portraits taken in her studio or artists’ own studios. In the catalogue, Molesworth notes how Lacombe captures intimate details: “The slight gap between Hilton Als’ two front teeth, the way Joan Didion’s left eye is slightly higher than her right one, the sly almost-smile that pulls at the corner of Fran Lebowitz’s mouth.” Lacombe has also spent decades photographing films sets and theatre productions, working with directors including Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, David Mamet, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack, Sam Mendes, Michael Haneke and Federico Fellini. Now 72, she got her big break at actor Dustin Hoffman’s invitation on shooting of All the President’s Men (1976) in Washington and Los Angeles. She recalls from New York: “It was all new to me. I was new to America, new to the world of film, and it was pretty spectacular. “Even though I was younger and I didn’t realise everything, I could see the scale of the production and [director] Alan Pakula was a pretty formidable figure. It was the height of fame of Robert Redford and Dustin. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were on the set.” Lacombe went on to work on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Director Spielberg “was fascinated with France – a big Francophile – but he had never really travelled or anything”, she says. “He offered the part of the professor to François Truffaut, who was one of his heroes. “The character of Truffaut is called Professor Lacombe: it was named after me. I think I was the only French girl that Steven knew at that time. I thought, oh, that’s nice, but only later did I realise that’s pretty great, to have a François Truffaut character named after you! Everybody was young and it’s only in retrospect.” But her most cherished collaboration is with Scorsese, dating back two decades to Gangs of New York. She only wishes she had met him earlier. “I come in like a guest with carte blanche to document how ever I want. It’s a wonderful position for me and he is the most extraordinary man. Not only him but everybody that works with him has to be at the top of their game. Everybody wants to do well by him and impress him and be at their utmost.” When photographing performers, Lacombe says, she aims to build a sense of trust so they will down their guard and get beyond the manufactured image. “For me a portrait is a collaboration with the person I photograph, one on one. You can be, let’s say, Tom Hanks or Barack Obama or any of the people I photograph, but it is a unique moment between you and them. It’s an exchange.” One time at the Cannes film festival documentary film-maker Michael Moore gave Lacombe just five seconds to take his picture. But one of her most moving experiences came with South African prisoner turned president Nelson Mandela. “It went – and I have it in my contact sheet – from one moment this completely dazzling smile and then, the second that smile was gone, it was a very tragic face. The incredible emotions that I felt from seeing that transformation, I could not erase that from my memory. Looking at these two images side by side, it’s like the portrait of that man. I had the sense that I was really seeing that person.” Opie’s photos of artists in Face to Face span 1993 to 2019. They include Justin Bond, Thelma Golden, Miranda July, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall and Rick Owens. In many the sitter is consumed by their thoughts and does not meet the gaze of the camera. The 61-year-old has not yet fulfilled her dream of photographing Barack and Michelle Obama but did have a memorable experience with the Hollywood actor and activist George Clooney, who was on a sound stage with an elaborate wardrobe – but someone forgot to bring his shoes. She says from Los Angeles: “So I have this portrait of George Clooney with his arms crossed, looking down – kind of like that portrait of John F Kennedy in the White House – but he’s standing there in a beautiful perfect suit without any shoes. There’s a vulnerability in that photograph that I just love, that feels very different from a celebrity portrait in a certain way.” Opie first gained renown for using traditional portraiture that brought members of the LGBTQ+ community into the cultural mainstream. “I was making that work thinking that I was going to mess myself up being able to get a teaching job and things like that. But in the end what happened was the work was celebrated right away with curators and museum shows and galleries wanting to represent me. “My own internal homophobia, what I thought was going to actually be a disadvantage for me in my career but I needed to do it because of the times that we were living in, turned out to be actually the right thing to do. I’m always telling my students to follow what is really important to you because because that is where the most value will come out of making the work for yourself.” Even so, there was some backlash from social conservatives over a show at the Guggenheim in 2008 in New York. “I was threatened as a lesbian by one person who was a stalker who said they were going to track me down and go to every one of my openings to steal my child away from me because they didn’t want this child raised in a queer household, that they needed to be in a Christian household. “That created an enormous amount of paranoia for me because my son was born in 2002 so in 2008 he was still a young boy, just thinking like at these huge museum openings somebody is going to come and try to swipe my son? That’s crazy.” Dean, born in Canterbury in the UK, has produced a series of portraits of older artists, including Cy Twombly, Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham. In Face to Face, her film One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021) records a conversation between the 99-year-old painter Luchita Hurtado and the 49-year-old artist Julie Mehretu. Dean’s mesmeric 16-minute film Portraits (2016) captures Hockney’s approach to art in his Los Angeles studio. It opens with a shot of the artist standing with his back to the camera, smoking and reading a book. Speaking from Berlin, where she is based, Dean, 57, says: “He was very happy to do it. I asked him, ‘Can I film you smoking?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll happily sit for you’ – he used the word ‘sit’. He’s just fanatically passionate about the right to smoke.” She had previously noticed Hockney’s idiosyncratic way of smoking cigarettes. “A lit cigarette is still one of the things that’s better on film than on video. It looks great on film.” Hockney painted a portrait of Dean’s 10-year-old son, Rufus, which is visible hanging on a wall in the film. “It’s called Portraits because he had all his portraits and his portrait of my son, and then my portrait of David with my son in the background, and then the five cigarettes. The plural portraits, plural cigarettes.” What does she hope people will take away from Face to Face? “I don’t hope for anything. An exhibition is all about what happens between the viewer and the work and that’s something that the artist doesn’t have much control over. It’s about that relationship. I find questions like that – sorry, forgive me – really banal. “Of course, I hope people enjoy it. I hope people go off somewhere in their heads. I don’t know. I don’t think artists generally hope for things like that. Personally, I don’t hope for anything. It all exists in that private space between the person looking at it and the work and that’s all in someone’s head and that’s what the relationship is.” Face to Face is on display at the International Center of Photography in New York until 1 May