Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The photography of Philip-Lorca diCorcia achieves a marvelous balance of artifice and the everyday. Over the past three decades, diCorcia has developed a unique and influential style, in which a realistic, almost documentary style of representation is subverted or countered by visibly staged composition. This combination of seemingly opposite qualities endows his images with a mysterious eeriness. In his Hustlers series (1990–1992), diCorcia made portraits of male prostitutes in minutely composed settings, and for Heads (2000–2001)--probably his most famous series--he depicted passersby on the street in New York (who were oblivious to his photographing them) as though they were film stars. Alongside the series Streetwork (1993–1999), Lucky 13 (2004) and A Storybook Life (1975–1999), this volume, published for a major European retrospective and produced in close collaboration with diCorcia, also features works from his new and ongoing East of Eden project.

Between 1990 and 1992, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, made multiple trips to Los Angeles to scout locations, invent scenarios and to find male prostitutes that would agree to pose for his camera. The last task proved to be the easiest: diCorcia simply used his fellowship money to pay the men whatever price they charged for their most typical service and ultimately prompted a complaint of misuse of government funds. In 1993, 21 selected images were initially exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, marking Philip-Lorca diCorcia's first solo exhibition. The show, entitled Strangers was accompanied by a museum catalog. Twenty years later, steidldangin publishes the series in its entirety. Hustlers is an empathetic yet melancholic poem of the Hollywood dream gone wrong, prescribing to the heavily-staged pictorialism and happenstance of street casting for which diCorcia is most widely recognized. Knowing precisely what he wanted from each photograph, and fearful of police involvement, diCorcia would prearrange all settings: this motel room, that vacant lot, in between cars, in a fast-food restaurant--the narrative was always deliberate. From the moment diCorcia approached a potential subject (usually around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood), to the completion of the shoot, seldom more than one hour had passed. The titles of these encounters amplify the facts--for example: "Ralph Smith, 21 years old, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and $25."

Between 1997 and 2008, Philip-Lorca diCorcia completed 11 photographic portfolios in collaboration with W magazine's creative director Dennis Freedman. In their epic scope and visual luxuriance, these enigmatic and glamour-soaked photographic narratives stand as one of the most ambitious editorial projects of the last decade. DiCorcia and Freedman traveled the globe to make these stories, deploying fabulous locations ranging from a Lautner house in Los Angeles and the Mariinsky Opera House in St. Petersburg to Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center and a notorious "club échangiste" (swinger's club) in Paris. The cast of characters included iconic models Nadja Auermann, Guinevere van Seenus, Kristen McMenamy, Karen Elson, Shalom Harlow and Hannelore Knuts, the actress Isabelle Huppert, the designer Marc Jacobs plus people cast on location. DiCorcia's fashion stories are collected for the first time in this superbly designed monograph, and reveal themselves as a masterpiece of staged photography and photographic storytelling.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979. DiCorcia's work has been the subject of solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among others. He has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. His previous books include A Storybook Life (2003) and Thousand (2007), a collection of Polaroids that was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. DiCorcia lives and works in New York City.

Back in Print! Philip-Lorca diCorcia's inventively staged and exquisitely crafted color photographs occupy a special place in contemporary art. Operating in the gap between postmodern fiction and documentary fact, between slick convention and fresh perception, they deliver a powerful emotional charge. The 55 color plates in this book, dating from 1978 to 1994, trace the evolution of a compelling and influential body of work. Beginning with enigmatic domestic scenarios whose protagonists are the photographer's family and friends, diCorcia moved on to an ambitious series in which Hollywood drifters and hustlers are pictured as emblematic figures of contemporary America. He proceeded to deploy his probing curiosity amid the energy and turmoil of big-city streets, reinvigorating a rich photographic tradition that had been dormant for nearly a generation.