Brigitte Lacombe photographs Meryl Streep for magazine debut

This Thursday, NeueHouse, a New York-based working space and gallery, is set to release its latest venture, NeueJournal. This biannual hardcover magazine features 264 pages of original content from its cultural collaborators, including the photographer Brigitte Lacombe, who shot seven different covers for the new publication.

Famous faces gracing the covers include Jake Gyllenhaal, Mary Heilmann, Oscar Isaac, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella and Robyn Wright. But Lacombe’s special photographic relationship with Meryl Streep reflects in her portrait for the magazine’s cover.

Lacombe, who first shot Streep in 1978, told Style.com: “I was very taken by Meryl right away… so luminous and unique-looking, intense and joyous, too.” Editor-in-chief Michelle Grey and editorial/creative director Dominic Teja Sidhu asked Streep about working with Lacombe: “Being photographed by her is the only time I don’t mind being photographed – in other situations I feel like a performing elephant,” Streep wrote for the editorial feature. “I feel like I don’t have to do anything. She does all the work.”

NeueJournal also features contributions by primatologist Jane Goodall, video director Vincent Haycock, painter Phillipe Parenno, musician Florence Welch, as well as a conversation between inventor Jaron Lanier and physicist/saxophonist Stephon Alexander, about insanity and music theory.

The eclecticism of collaborators places the new publication into the intellectual sphere, setting it apart from the typical “glossy” magazine. The conversational approach reveals the vulnerabilities of the individuals involved. “The conversation and the words of the actual subjects we were profiling were so much more interesting than your standardized journal,” commented Grey, “so much more human.”

To see Streep’s cover and feature for NeueJournal, click this link.