Strange Days, Extraordinary Pleasures, And Deep Attachments With Brigitte Lacombe

Staying Close to Home with the Legendary French Photographer

Interview: Oana Stanescu

I don’t know what time it is, exactly, just as I’m not sure what day it is. Loosely we’re somewhere between a Thursday and a Tuesday, on a sunny spring day in our shared home borough of Manhattan. I did get dressed with purpose, rehearsing indulgently for the day when we will be allowed to leave the house. For now, I keep the window wide open, taking in the sun and magnolias in full bloom. I receive a text message from Brigitte Lacombe that makes me smile: “Confinement would not be the same without you!” We are in the midst of finalizing our shopping list for the weekly grocery run. She is asking for suggestions and we agree on french yogurt: “we have to save the clay pots!”

Wine? “Drinks are better shared.”

Tea? “I am quite obsessive about tea, I have a good reserve.”

Brigitte Lacombe is a French photographer who has been obsessive about taking pictures since the 70s. She calls it her “alarming addiction”. Whether they are portraits of familiar, famous faces (Pharrell, Meryl Streep, Patti Smith, Miuccia Prada, Joan Didion), movie sets and theater backstages, or everyday scenes, her images deliver a caliber of intimacy that feels unearned. The physical closeness of her portraits is arresting. Everything is stripped bare to the essential. The eyes you are staring at are looking for you. Brigitte isn’t capturing faces, or personalities, she is capturing a person’s being. And none of this develops by accident. It’s the result of Lacombe’s long-harvested communion, let’s call it, with that mysterious thing, so hard to spell out: intimacy.

Brigitte was born in Southern France and became a photographer by doing it, obsessively, compulsively. It started with fashion magazines, when she quickly took fate into her own hands and followed her love of film, or rather the behind-the-scenes, and ultimately, people. A true independent in thought and structure, she has been in complete control over her career ever since. There is not a single important figure she hasn’t shot, yet she is most interested in the scientists of the Breakthrough Prize that she has been documenting for years and in people on the street. Recent projects include Forward: Twenty Years of TimesTalks, a book celebrating the NYTimes’s live conversation series, and the documentary “Brigitte” by director Lynne Ramsay, as part of Miu Miu Women’s Tales series (“It was I think a big turning point for me. When you never look at yourself, it's very hard to suddenly see yourself”).

Oana on the weekly grocery run. Image above: Brigitte and Perry social distancing.

I met Brigitte 8 years ago in Cannes, with Janet, her representative (and friend, and right hand), I later learned that Brigitte’s family home was in Le Cannet, a commune nextdoor, and she had been a fixture at the festival since 1975. “I was the only woman photographer and I was young and pretty and I was completely clueless but because I was clueless, I was not questioning,” she tells me. The festival led her to eventually work with directors like Fellini and Spielberg. This year’s 73rd annual Cannes Film Festival is scheduled to take place in 2020—though for now, no date has been set. All the same, Le Cannet is on her mind while we’re walking six feet apart, on the Lower East Side. But so are the healthcare professionals, the garbage men, the store clerks, and everyone making sure the world still turns.

Our conversation took place in February, at Brigitte’s favorite corner cafe, on an unusually quiet Monday that seemed like a brief moment of respite from our hectic travel schedules. She was talking about the need to slow down, to turn inwards, to find her place: “My time is now counted, precious…” Now that we are all indefinitely grounded, Brigitte is staying at her studio “editing and watching films (Goddard, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Scorsese), reading (New Yorker, NYT, FT, Le Monde).” It turns out that self isolation tastes very different when imposed, and that a sense of home might be more urgent than anticipated. “It is almost impossible to grasp that everything has come to a standstill. It’s very hard to comprehend, to understand exactly what it means.” She is adamant she won‘t miss shooting though. “What I miss is not being able to move, or to be outside. I wish I had escaped earlier.”

Meryl Streep, "Kramer vs. Kramer," New York, NY, 1978.

On Being Protective

I always felt too protective of the people I photograph, because I am so deeply feeling what I feel from them. And sometimes if you know people very well, then you really know you're asking a lot of them. My obvious example is Meryl Streep who I have photographed now for for what? 35 years or more? And I just know that she has no enjoyment—she does not like it—she really does it out of obligation. I am so keenly aware of how difficult it is for her.

Nelson Mandela, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2002.

On Closeness

When I photographed Nelson Mandela, I photographed him with film, with a Hasselblad. I work with lenses that are quite short and you have to be close to someone. I looked into his face and it was so emotionally powerful. He had this dazzling smile, but when he finished that smile, the second photograph was a very tragic face.

On Spaces

My studio is not a true photography studio, it's more like coming to someone's space and everyone feels well in there. As you know, as an architect, there is a mystery to why people feel well in spaces or not. I travel 9 months out of the year and every single hotel room I walk into, I know immediately if I'm feeling well or not. Sometimes you don't know why, but there is this mysterious thing about spaces.

On Movies, Hollywood, Observing

It was much easier to approach actors and directors [in the 70s, at Cannes]. I met Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland. Dustin invited me to go to All The President's Men, in Washington, D.C., and Donald invited me to Rome where he was going to shoot Fellini’s Casanova. To arrive in L.A. in the mid 70s and enter Hollywood at its most creative was a dream. I met all of these extraordinary filmmakers—Spielberg, DePalma—who were already changing the world of Cinema. And so from then, I just went on. It was a time when there were a lot of drugs, in the open, there were plates of coke in people's living rooms. But I never did any drugs, I don't know why. I was always an observer, I was never at the center.

Issey Miyake Women Spring/Summer 2020 ad campaign.

On Having a Uniform

I was introduced to Issey Miyake by my great friend who was the editor of Vogue at the time in Paris—Colombe Pringle. She said you have to meet him. He is the most generous, elegant, extraordinary man. My first time in Japan was amazing because I was his guest. He had just started Pleats Please, and he gave me a skirt, a shirt, a little bag. And then that's it, that's all I wore. Now it's been over 20 years that I wear only that, every day and it really changed my life. Issey Miyake used to work only with Irving Penn, for many many years. And now, he asked me to do the campaign. It's one of my great joys and pride, because I admire and respect him so much, and love him too.

On Objects

I am something of a small kleptomaniac. I take an ashtray, a napkin, and I am madly attached to every little thing that I find along the way. It's a big problem because I am attached to things that I actually don't even know I have anymore because they accumulate and I never have time to look at them. I do not own anything of value, and really do not buy anything much except books.

From left to right: Andy Warhol (1977), Agnès Varda (1975), and on the set of *All the President's Men* (1975).

On Doing What You Love

I love my life and my work and I realize every day that I am extremely privileged to do the work I chose every day. I am grateful for it.

On Independence

I've always been a loner. I've never been part of a group. I generate a lot of my work by seeking the people and the stories that interest me most.

On Always Seeking

I always feel that I can ask anyone to do their portrait, or to work on one of their projects, because I think that I have something to offer in return. A lot of people think that it is an imposition, but I do not feel that way.