Great Performers

Each year, Times critics A. O. Scott and Wesley Morris select the year’s best film actors to be honored in our Great Performers issue. This year, photographer Jack Davison was commissioned to create raw black-and-white portraits of each performer in natural, unadorned light. Using a design inspired by the repetitive and deconstructed movement found in film stills, each actor’s last name was used to create bold typographic headlines that harked back to old Hollywood. The spliced nature of the letterforms lent themselves to dynamic animations on both web and mobile.