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.”
