may not be, and where what seems intimate may, in
fact, be artifice. His collection entitledA Storybook
Life(consisting of pictures taken between 1975 and
1999 presented as a group in 2003) can be read as a
retrospective tracing his career in 76 images. Those
portrayed are engaged in trivial or everyday activ-
ities: a father with his daughter, a cook, a woman
laying down on a bed, a man leaning on his elbow
on a car door, having a discussion with the female
driver. diCorcia, however, makes his subjects
appear singular by his treatment of the scene. The
woman who cooks seems removed from the reality
of what she is doing; her gestures are suspended,
the knife in her right hand, food in the other. Arti-
ficial and natural lighting is combined, blurring the
photograph as a straightforward document a skill
developed by diCorcia in his commercial work. The
seemingly naturalistic but highly planned set up
places his subjects inside a story, albeit an ambiva-
lent or shifting narrative. With this method and the
resulting image diCorcia proposes a new approach
to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘‘decisive moment.’’
In his seriesHollywood(1990–1992), composed of
20 handsome and haunting ektacolor prints, di-
Corcia chose those who have dropped out of main-
stream society as photographic topics, including male
prostitutes, drag queens, and drug addicts found on
California’s Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica
sidewalks. For this series, diCorcia initially chose
sites (streets, motels, restaurant), planned the set up
and the lighting, and then sought out models. These
models are in the final work identified by their name
or nickname, their age, and their hometown, and
become ‘‘merchandise’’ in the strict sense of the
word because diCorcia also added to the title the
amount paid to the model, as inEddie Anderson; 21
Years Old; Houston, Texas; $20, 1990–1992. Unlike
Nan Goldin or Jack Pierson, who incidentally were
his classmates at the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, his pictures place each human being in solitude
pregnant with a dramatic intensity. Yet diCorcia’s
working method was in fact subversive, for he paid
his models from a grant he received from the
National Endowment for the Arts, which at that
time had set guidelines in reaction to the controver-
sies that had erupted around Robert Mapplethorpe.
diCorcia explained:
I started to think about that particular project in response
to social antipathy towards gays and homosexuals at the
end of the 80s and to a generally conservative backlash
against that aspect of society. ...I was given a govern-
ment grant on condition my work did not go against
moral values. I protested by indicating in the legends
how much I had paid the hustlers using money from this
government grant.The seriesTwo Hours, composed of 11 large-
scale images taken at the same location on the
streets of La Havane, and the seriesStreetwork,
depict passersby. But diCorcia does not so much
take pictures of individuals as he focuses on a
new species, the inhabitants of the street. The
people photographed by diCorcia are strange
hybrid beings characterized by their stereotypical
humanity, like the businessman with his news-
paper under the arm, umbrella in one hand and
mobile phone in the other, yet becoming unreal
archetypes that are barely recognizable as real
humans. As always, diCorcia’s shooting techni-
que accentuates the fictional character of these
photographic sequences. In these series the cam-
era is placed level with the ground instead of at
eye level, and he uses flash to augment the nat-
ural lighting. The mournful unreality of fiction
that infuses his work expresses the alienation and
dislocation of contemporary urban life in the
United States and around the world.
ThomasCyrilBiography
Born 1953 in Hartford, Connecticut. Attended University
of Hartford early 1970s; School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, Diploma, 1975; Post
Graduate Certificate, 1976; Yale University, New
Haven, M.F.A., 1979. Relocated to New York City;
freelance magazine photographer, 1984–present day,
shooting forEsquire,Fortune,W, andDetails.Strangers
series, shown at Museum of Modern Art, 1993. Recipi-
ent Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship, 1980, 1986, 1989; John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship, 1987. Visiting Critic, Yale Uni-
versity. Living in New York.Individual Exhibitions
1985 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Fotographies; Zeus Arts, Milan,
Italy
1991 Philip-Lorca diCorcia; The Photographers’ Gallery, Lon-
don, England
1993 Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Strangers; Museum of Modern
Art, New York, New York
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Strangers and Others; Galeria
Palmira Suso, Lisbon, Portugal
1994 Portraits of America; Nikon Salon, Tokyo, Japan
1995 Art & Public; Geneva, Switzerland
1996 Street work; PaceWildensteinMacGill, New York,
New York
1997 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Hustler/Street work; Museo
National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and Uni-
versity of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
Streetwork; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, France
1999 Philip-Lorca diCorcia; Art Space Ginza, Tokyo, Japan
2000 Galeria OMR; Mexico City, Mexico
2001 Galerie Almine Rech; Paris, FrancediCORCIA, PHILIP-LORCA