Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Hartford, Connecticut (USA), 1953

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.

Head # 4, 2000
Head # 22, 2001

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.

London, 1993

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.