By Lacombe anima persona
408 pages; Steidldangin

The operative word is: contact. You can hardly turn a page of Brigitte Lacombe's splendid new book of photographs without coming face-to-face with celebrity and history: Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Joan Didion, Jack Nicholson, Toni Morrison...and the list goes on. Over the past three decades and more, the Parisian-bred Lacombe has worked extensively behind the scenes, on the set of a Hollywood film, in an artist's studio, in the desert or in the urban jungle, wherever the human drama is unfolding. Lacombe is a master of portraiture, but also of those moments when people connect with one another, when iconic figures drop their guard to reveal the reality behind the artifice, the humanity behind the hype.

— Cathleen Medwick