Colecciones de arte

London, 1993

DESCRIPTION

One of the constants in Philip-Lorca diCorcia's photography is the reproduction of scenes from daily life in which the human figure is the main element. As if creating a sub-genre of street photography, diCorcia rescues urban scenes, to a large extent treating them as scenery; again, as in other series -Heads or Family and Friends- in this image, belonging to the series Streetwork, he once again makes manifest the contradiction between reality and artifice.

In this case, the stage chosen is London and the transient protagonists look like executives.

The frozen scene still conveys the boisterous activity of a major city and the loss of identity in a world where haste rules; this series seems to confer chance greater significance by choosing a street scene at random. Again, there is a marked cinematographic quality to the scene, which seems to describe the sequence of a film where the main protagonist is absent, thus underlining the relevance of the lack of identity in big cities where human beings lose significance as individuals in order to become part of a larger whole, to shape the urban landscape. Far from being a snapshot, the setting seems to be readied for the photographic shot. The scene juxtaposes the grey of the buildings with the dark suits of the pedestrians, as well as the man who seems to be walking toward us, while, near him, another turns his back on us; and perhaps it is in this captivating reality in which diCorcia seems to be most comfortable: when the spectator is the one who really has to imagine what has happened and what is about to occur.

DiCorcia began to produce this series in New York in 1993, portraying the pedestrians passing by on the big city streets, capturing all kinds of people. The characters pose without noticing the camera, the technique therefore remaining invisible. As the years went by, he was to depict scenes taken outside the United States, travelling extensively to demonstrate that this loss of identity takes place in all the major cities of the world.

The large-scale format of these pictures causes the spectator to constantly question whether this is fact or fiction, for once again the intense colours and lighting emphasise that the true protagonists are the pedestrians, pertaining to a highly measured, almost virtual, strange reality. In these urban images, the relationships between people, the fleetingness of contemporary life and the very alienation of present-day rituals are captured, rendering fictitious an image that is not at all unreal. To be sure, it confers a degree of complicity given that we as spectators could be among the pedestrians appearing in these pictures. These are familiar, ordinary scenes that seem far away because of their appearance but that are, paradoxically, our own reflection. T. P.