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Philip-Lorca diCorcia attended photography classes at the University of Hartford during the early eighties. Two years later, he enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. He continued his studies at Yale University, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in Photography in 1979.

Upon leaving Yale, he spent a short time in Hollywood before returning to New York, where he found several jobs assisting professional photographers, from whom he learned various techniques used in commercial photography. In 1984, he started working freelance for Fortune, Esquire and some of Condé Nast's travel magazines. Five years later, he earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He later travelled to Los Angeles in search of locations for his photographs.

Known as one of the renovators of street photography due to his selective combination of natural and artificial light, one of his first most noteworthy series is Family and Friends (1981-1999), in which he portrayed his friends and family members with a marked documentary style but, at the same time, an undeniable staging; images such as Catherine (1981) or Mario (1981) certify the meticulousness with which this artist works and his constant preoccupation with the employment of skilled photographic technique.

Concurrent with this series, he often visited Santa Monica Boulevard and its vicinity in California, where he portrayed characters whose lives were on the limit, giving rise to the series Hollywood (1990), a depiction of the male prostitutes working in the area. As if he were a collector, he entitled every photograph using the model's name, age, native city and the money earned for posing for the photograph. This excellent series was presented at his first one person exhibition in 1995 at the Museum of Modern Art of New York, positioning him as one of the referents in the field of contemporary photography. Following this show, he began the series Streetwork (1993-1999), urban pictures he began capturing on New York city streets and eventually encompassing major cities all over the world.

These images are characterised by a profound reflection on the individual and his loss of identity in big cities. He thus created photographs that juxtaposed reality and fiction, for these commonplace street scenes seem to belong to staged plots that, due to the mise-en-scene, have nothing to do with reality, and yet they faithfully reflect our own contemporaneousness.

Along the lines of the earlier series, he produced Heads (1999-2001), consisting of seventeen portraits of anonymous characters captured on the streets in the vicinity of Times Square, unaware of the photograph being taken. These images are loaded with theatricality, showing the people depicted as if before a spotlight in front of a dark background, thus bestowing them a supernatural halo. Basically, diCorcia's work focuses on ordinary scenes: on details that elicit the contemplation of the reflection of the "other" who is actually us, and that continuous interrelation of fact and fiction that leads us to a consideration of our own contemporary habits. Images that contain the enigma always inhabiting the ordinary. T. P.