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Over the 30 years spanning his career, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has become one of the most influential photographers in the 21st century, credited for pioneering the “fictional” approach in contemporary photography, as well as re-defining the use of artificial lighting. On top of this, for 17 years now, diLorca has been much in demand as a professor at the Yale School of Art. He has alternated from street projects to highly choreographed scenes, always aiming to challenge the preconceptions about both the medium of photography and the subject he chooses to frame.
His work has had an impact on, not only a generation of photographers, but most recently he has injected his rare originality and intelligence into a number of fashion, commercial and advertising projects, including Fendi, Bottega Veneti, Adobe and W Magazine. As a student of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during the 1970s, DiCorcia stood out as an innovator. He reacted against his contemporaries’ preference for following artistic concepts instead of the development of photographic technique.
He became interested in 19th century methods of staging photographs, and aimed to create more than an aesthetic effect in his work; his methods probed the mechanisms and processes underlying photography.
After Boston, diCorcia travelled South to Yale University, from which he received a MFA in photography in 1979. During his early career diCorcia used friends to construct meticulously posed and symbolically loaded photographs that would trick the viewer into believing they were real.
It was in the 1990s that diCorcia began to attract critical attention with his Hustler’s series, with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts. He travelled America photographing male prostitutes, labeling each photo with the name, hometown, age and fee charged. For the project, diCorcia picked up prostitutes on the streets of Hollywood. Driving down a notorious Santa Monica Boulevard, he would hail down prostitutes; but when they approached and offered him money, instead of asking for sex, he requested a photograph. DiCorcia took the prostitute to a pre-prepared setting, the photograph would be taken, and diCorcia would pay the prostitute.
The resulting photographs were brutally stark, poised between fiction and harsh reality.
My first experience with diCorcia’s work was when I visited Tate Modern’s Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Survelliance exhibition (2010). The show displayed large prints of people walking against a black background, their faces motionless, as if they were in a trance.
Upon inquiry, I found out the photographs were taken by diCorcia at night, after he hid a strobe light in the scaffolding of Times Square and captured photographs of pedestrians as they walked past, oblivious to the fact they were being photographed. The people, immersed in thought, illuminated by stunning lighting, looked monumental in spite of their everyday quality. It was a brilliant experiment in the mechanisms of portraiture, and the images immediately had a strong impact on me.
DiCorcia’s latest exhibition is East Of Eden, showing at the David Zwirner Gallery, London while another show of his work, Hustlers, runs simultaneously at David Zwirner Gallery in New York It weaves his usual balance of staged theatricality with informal and spontaneous subjects, resulting in works of uncanny power. The title of the exhibition carries Biblical references, as well as those to Steinbacks novel of the same name (also set in California). Speaking about the show, diCorcia explains that the thread of biblical narrative and myth is subtly woven into the photographs. It begins fittingly with an image of a blind lady and her guide dog, who is standing on a patch of dirt facing towards a garden full of green and flowers.
The stories of Genesis, Cain, Abel, the Fall – in essence, good and evil – are intelligently worked into the carefully staged images of deceptively ordinary and every-day subjects. Each photograph has the rare ability to be simple in subject matter but epic in the atmosphere it creates due to his striking lighting and staging. We are presented with a single apple tree fills that fills frame, a chilling graveyard and two isolated cars on a highway. Even in the more “shocking” of his photographs, the secondary narrative is only implied. For instance, we see an image of a pregnant woman, naked in heels in the background while two men embrace on a bed: an eerily calm scene within a dramatic moment; we also see a small dart thrown at the photographer’s own son.
It is difficult to leave a diCorcia exhibition without feeling moved; the works are always arresting, the impact strong – almost confrontational. East of Eden is no exception.
by Diana Kurakina
with additional reporting by Justin van Vliet
Portraits of Philip-Lorca diCorcia by Justin van Vliet
East of Eden is on until November 16 at David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EZ
tel: +44 203 538 3165
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm
Monday by appointment