Colecciones de arte

Head # 4, 2000

DESCRIPTION

Philip-Lorca deCorcia recreates images of unknown characters portrayed in public places that, unlike documentary photographs, are images linked to subjectivity itself, exploring the concept of "reality" from a photographic viewpoint. Both Head # 4 and Head # 22 belong to the photographic series called Heads that Philip-Lorca diCorcia produced between 1999 and 2001. In both images, we observe the absent faces of anonymous, unknown passers-by rescued from the bustling city, ironically confronted with the isolation of their environment and the solitude of big city hubbub.

He thus rescues two transients on New York city streets and specifically in the area of Times Square, where diCorcia strategically placed some stroboscopic lights on scaffoldings and set off the flashes with a radio transmitter located in the camera itself, whereby the characters were unaware of the photography shot although they were captured in full daylight, in a clear allusion to the increasing social impact of video surveillance cameras and the security measures people are subjected to. The resultant images offer us absent faces giving off dream-like, seemingly unreal light, again confronting fact and fiction in these photographs, in addition to mixing natural and artificial light.

This artist's aim, therefore, is to rescue the pedestrian from daily life and the anonymity reining in cities, and to portray him/her as absolute protagonist of these images. These photographs of absent faces thus resemble the magic realism of Latin American literature, transforming the real into fiction, thanks to a staging in which a fantastic element is introduced. This mingling of reality and fiction is a constant in Philip-Lorca diCorcia's work, and can even be considered to have cinematographic influences, taking into account that, during the seventies, this photographer fleetingly addressed the film world through photography, thus portraying a transformed, distorted reality, achieved through technique, colour and lighting, yet not acquiring any photographic artifice. Above all, this artist's method is based on his meticulousness.

The visual impact of the series Heads resides, in addition to the manipulation of this reality through technique, in that image of presumed melancholy where we do not know whether something has already happened or is about to occur. In both images, Head # 4 and Head # 22, both faces seems to irradiate something supernatural, but at the same time, we can hardly see any clues revealing anything about them. With this series, as the artist himself has stated, he aimed to provoke the impact of the image in itself. T. P.