Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Lights real streets and staged rooms alike until a snapshot looks like a film still.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born at Hartford in Connecticut in 1951, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and took his MFA at Yale in 1979. The early work staged moments in domestic interiors, lit so carefully that ordinary scenes looked cinematic. Hustlers, made in Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992, photographed men working on Santa Monica Boulevard, each paid his usual fee and titled with his name, age, home town and the sum. Streetwork and Heads moved into the city: strobes hidden on scaffolding lit passers-by who did not know they were being photographed, which led one subject of Heads to sue, unsuccessfully, in the New York courts. Later series include A Storybook Life and Lucky Thirteen.
The prints are colour, most often chromogenic, and made in small editions; several images exist in more than one size as separate editions, so series, size and edition number together identify the work. Chromogenic colour is sensitive to light, and fading or colour shift on a print that has spent years on a wall is the most common condition problem, with creasing and mount failure on the larger sheets close behind. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on a label or the verso, and his galleries hold the edition records.
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