An obese and imposing Orson Welles spilling over his chair, cigar in hand, and a relaxed-looking Ethan Hawke in suit and tennis shoes are among the cinema idols captured by the lens of American portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in his first solo show in Rome.
Florida-born Greenfield-Sanders has photographed hundreds of starlets, artists, rock musicians and politicians over the past three decades but is best known in Italy for his 2005 Milan exhibition 'XXX', which showed 30 porn stars holding the same poses, first with their clothes on and then with their clothes off.
Around 50 portraits of fully dressed actors and directors are on display in the tamer Rome show, which has opened at the Museo Carlo Bilotti.
Woody Allen agreed to be photographed especially for the exhibition, which includes images of screen legends Nicole Kidman, Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren as well as film-makers Spike Lee, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.
Respiro actress Valeria Golino is the only native Italian to be included in the show.
Taking a minimalist approach to his work, Greenfield-Sanders photographs his subjects against neutral backgrounds with a single source of light and tries to capture the essence of his sitter by concentrating on the eyes.
''He 'listens' like an analyst, and his photographs aim to present the best side and at the same time the 'truest' aspect of the person in front of him,'' said curator Gianni Mercurio. ''The result has great psychological potency which marries aesthetic elegance with technical quality and makes his work unmistakable,'' he added.
The gallery of famous faces includes both colour and black and white shots in varying dimensions, although the photographer's recent work tends to be life size or even larger, giving the images what Mercurio describes as a cinematic ''realer than real'' quality.
Greenfield-Sanders's ability to fall into step with the moods of his sitter within minutes is one of the reasons the stars give for their eagerness to pose for his camera.
''I've known people who literally never look bad in a photo - they're like wild animals, and it's practically impossible to take a bad photo of a tiger,'' said actor Alec Baldwin, whose image also appears in the Rome show. ''I'm no tiger, but Timothy Greenfield-Sanders knows how to overcome the problem''.
In addition to his porn star snaps, Greenfield-Sanders has recently produced another startling series of photos of wounded American Iraq war veterans shown with prosthetic limbs and plastic eyeballs which goes on show in New York, Basel and Stockholm later this year.
Works by the photographer also hang in the permanent collections of 24 museums worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. 'Movie stars. Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' runs at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome until 13 January 2008.
