William Coupon: Portraits

This long-overdue monograph presents an astonishing panorama of portraits by American photographer William Coupon (born 1952). With his camera, the photographer was given unprecedented access to artists, musicians and politicians such as Elie Wiesel, Mick Jagger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Harrison, Miles Davis with his daughter, David Byrne and many others. He photographed these people against a backdrop of hand-painted Belgian linen, side-lit by a single fixture, with a medium-format camera, producing painterly portraits that recall Rembrandt and Holbein. Coupon has diverged little from this method over the years, whether shooting the president in the Oval Office or indigenous people.

Looking through these images, we see the range of personalities and faces, known and unknown, that has caught Coupon's eye from 1978 to the present.