108 Portraits

Gus Van Sant

1992

Published by Twin Palms Publishers (Los Angeles)

124 pages

27 x 34 cm.

Out of all the proposed selection, this is probably the most personal choice. I still remember when I saw this book in 1992, when it was published. Its impact was huge. Of course, I knew the Van Sant films that had supplied most of portraits in the book. But what interested me was the fetishism the book was made with, like a collection of picture cards of all his actors, collaborators and friends. I like the systematic language completely devoid of any extras: black and white, frontality, medium shot, flat surface that negates any depth… all to give paramount importance to the subject, the person. It is a collection of people. And yet there is something that escapes the will to leave the portraits as bare as possible: the clothes, each person’s own style. In the end and seen in retrospective over thirty years later, two things remain: Van Sant’s vampire-like gaze on the portrayed, and fashion from the early nineties, which for me is still the one that, in one way or another, has defined everything that has come since.

Luis Cerveró