108 Portraits

The film director’s debut collection of portrait-photographs. Every subject is photographed in a frontal pose, taken at a medium-shot angle with minimal lighting, thereby bringing out both the chiaroscuro effect of light and shadow and the expressiveness of his subjects’ faces and bodies. Gus Van Sant began taking photographs for the auditions of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. The casual picture-taking quickly developed into a full-fledged project, encompassing a Who’s Who of twentieth-century cinema and capturing the exuberance and hedonism of a decade.