Three ways of pointing a camera at an artist, and three answers to the same uneasy question: how near can a portrait come before the sitting turns into publicity? Face to Face sets Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie side by side, not to blur their differences but to let them register. Dean works with cinema’s capacity for duration; Lacombe photographs on assignment; Opie holds to the tradition of the studio portrait. Within one volume, portraiture becomes an argument about time, access, and control.

The sitters are painters, writers, musicians, film-makers, and photographers — among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Fran Lebowitz, Patti Smith, and Kara Walker. Because the three artists often return to the same subjects, the book permits an uncommon kind of comparison: one face handled three ways, each version exposing what the others leave out. Intimacy and publicity pull against each other throughout.

Published by MACK in 2023 to accompany an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New York, the book carries essays by the show’s curator, Helen Molesworth, and by the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest. Its 164 pages appear as a paperback with a PVC jacket, at 24 by 29 centimetres — a format that gives the portraits room without inflating them.

For a collector, the interest lies less in a single signature than in a set of methods placed in view. Few books put three distinct photographic intelligences against shared ground so deliberately. The result is not a roll call of famous faces but a study of what portraiture can still be asked to do.