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PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA |
In the "Heads" series, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s "street portraits," he cunningly combines candid images of people caught unaware while walking in Times Square with bright cinematic lighting. The photographs in this series were made by setting up a hidden strobe light to illuminate a spot marked on the sidewalk in a crowded New York City street. As passersby stepped on the spot, diCorcia would take their pictures from a camera equipped with a 500 mm lens set on a tripod over twenty feet away. The resulting images of ordinary people as they go about their lives are anything but ordinary. The photographs are stark and surreal and invite consideration of the circumstances or stories surrounding the individuals, all of who appear strangely alienated and detached.
DiCorcia first became interested in photography in the early 1970s and received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Yale University in 1979. By 1984 he was making a living as a freelance photographer working for Fortune, Esquire, and later for some Condé Nast publications. Today, he lives and works in New York and is well known for the pseudo-documentary and cinematic style of his photographs. Much of diCorcia’s work straddles the line between modern and postmodern notions of photography. His keen awareness of and ability to capture the "decisive moment" evoke the traditions of street photography and the belief in a photograph as a record of reality. But by contriving and controlling his seemingly spontaneous pictures, diCorcia works with a postmodernist’s understanding of photography as a fictive medium where one creates realities to explore how we see and ascribe meaning. The "Heads" series is not conventional, street photography, nor is it portraiture in any traditional sense. By taking candid shots that appear as staged portraits, diCorcia cleverly undermines the norms for both genres.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects