Philip-Lorca diCorcia

American photographer

Philip Lorca diCorcia (born 1953) is an American photographer, living in New York City. He teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

DiCorcia was born in 1953 in Hartford, Connecticut. The DiCorcia family is of Italian descent, having moved to the United States from Abruzzo. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he earned a diploma in 1975 and a 5th year certificate in 1976. Afterwards diCorcia attended Yale University, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in photography in 1979. Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire. He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject, often isolating them from the other people in the street. His photographs give a sense of heightened drama to accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions of those passing by. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached from the world around them, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers by back into the city's anonymity. As they are pre planned, diCorcia often plants in his concepts issues like the marketing of reality, the commodification of identity, art, and morality. In 1989, financed by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship of $45,000, DiCorcia began his Hustlers project. Starting in the early 1990s, he made five trips to Los Angeles to photograph male prostitutes in Hollywood. He used a 6×9 Linhof view camera, which he positioned in advance with Polaroid tests. At first, he photographed his subjects only in motel rooms. Later, he moved onto the streets. When the Museum of Modern Art exhibited 25 of the photographs in 1993 under the title Strangers, each was labeled with the name of the man who posed, his hometown, his age, and the amount of money that changed hands. In 1999, diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and took a series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. This resulted in two published books, Streetwork (1998) which showed wider views including subjects' entire bodies, and Heads (2001), which featured more closely cropped portraits as the name implies. Originally published in W as a result of a collaboration with Dennis Freedman between 1997 and 2008, diCorcia produced a series of fashion stories in places such as Havana, Cairo and New York.

Philip Lorca diCorcia. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995; 2003. With a text by Peter Galassi. Streetwork, 1993–1997. Spain: Centro de Fotografía and Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1998. With texts by JoséLuis Brea and diCorcia. Exhibition catalogue. Streetwork. Mexico City: Galeria OMR, 2000. Exhibition catalogue. Streetwork. With a text by Thomas Weski. Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 2000. Exhibition catalogue. Heads. Göttingen: Steidl, 2001. With text by Luc Sante. Exhibition catalogue. Rencontres 6: Philip Lorca diCorcia. Paris: Images Modernes, 2001. With a text by Jeff Rian. A Storybook Life. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2003. Lucky Thirteen. New York: PaceWildenstein, 2005. Philip Lorca diCorcia. Steidl/Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2007. With a text by Bennett Simpson, a foreword by Jill Medvedow, and an interview with diCorcia by Lynne Tillman. Exhibition catalogue. Thousand. New York and Göttingen, Germany: SteidlDangin, 2007. Eleven. Bologna, Italy: Freedman Damiani, 2011. Edited by Dennis Freedman. With text by Mary Gaitskill and an interview with diCorcia by Jeff Rian. Hustlers. New York and Göttingen, Germany: SteidlDangin, 2013. With a text by diCorcia. Philip Lorca diCorcia. Edited by Katharina Dohm, Hendrik Driessen, and Max Hollein. With texts by Dohm and Geoff Dyer, and an interview with diCorcia by Christoph Ribbat. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber. Exhibition catalogue. Philip Lorca diCorcia: III Premio Internacional de Fotografía/III International Photography Award. Madrid: Centro de Arte Alcobendas, 2014. With texts by Martinez de Corral, Ignacio Garcia de Vinuesa, Luis Miguel Torres Hernandez, and Christoph Ribbat. Exhibition catalogue.

In 2006, a New York trial court issued a ruling in a case involving one of his photographs. One of diCorcia's New York random subjects was Erno Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew who objected on religious grounds to diCorcia's publishing in an artistic exhibition a photograph taken of him without his permission. The photo's subject argued that his privacy and religious rights had been violated by both the taking and publishing of the photograph of him. The judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the photograph taken of Nussenzweig on a street is art not commerce and therefore is protected by the First Amendment. Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische ruled that the photo of Nussenzweig—a head shot showing him sporting a scraggly white beard, a black hat and a black coat—was art, even though the photographer sold 10 prints of it at $20,000 to $30,000 each. The judge ruled that New York courts have "recognized that art can be sold, at least in limited editions, and still retain its artistic character ( ) [F]irst [A]mendment protection of art is not limited to only starving artists. A profit motive in itself does not necessarily compel a conclusion that art has been used for trade purposes." The case was appealed and dismissed on procedural grounds.

Unfamiliar Streets. Katherine A. Bussard. The Photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip Lorca diCorcia. Philip Lorca diCorcia Analogues of Reality. Yale University Press. 2012. p. 156. Referenced April 6, 2015.