Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a American photographer , born in 1953 with Hartford in the Connecticut. He lives and works with New York. Its photographs associate elements of the artistic style Documentaire with a principle of controlled and complex construction suitable for the image of Fiction.

Biography

Formation

Philip-Lorca diCorcia starts to be interested in the Photographie at the beginning of the Années 1970 with the beginning of which he studies photography at the university of Hartford. It is graduate " School off the Museum off Fine Arts" of Boston in 1975 and enters the training program in photography in two years of the university Yale to New Haven in 1979. After being itself interested in the conceptual photography of its time, diCorcia, during its formation with Yale, inherits two usually opposite approaches of photography.

an approach supported by the American documentary tradition resulting, amongst other things of photographers like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, according to which even if documentary photography is well recognized as being an artistic style, it is about a style based on the idea that photography would be a medium which would allow a direct transposition of reality such as it is, in images. This design of photography tends to consider that reality and its representation are in perfect adequacy.

But, beyond this approach of photography, diCorcia also inherits an approach of photography like medium to the many creative possibilities. It is particularly influenced by the esthetics of the advertizing image but also by certain aspects of the tographic image Cinéma. According to Peter Galassi, if diCorcia adopts the vocabulary of commercial photography, it is not a question for him to judge the latter but to recognize it like an integral part of her experiment.

Professional life/personal artistic Work

In 1981 , graduate of Yale, diCorcia leaves New York because it is not sure to want to make photography, it then seeks a work in the industry of the Cinéma but in vain. It returns then to New York where it works as an assistant photographer.

Since 1984 , it earns its living as a photographer of magazines like Esquire , Fortune then, Condé Nast Traveler and Details . Thus, so in his artistic work one finds the manufacturing process of the cinematographic images, one finds there also the esthetics of the photography of magazine.

Until beginning of the year 90, its personal work is made up mainly of images representing of the scenes of the banal life but each time given in cinematographic scene of way: the camera is always on a foot, lighting is completely artificial and thus controlled, the characters pose during the catch of sight. - In 2003 , diCorcia joins together the images of this first period in its work has Storybook Life (see the continuation of the article).

With the beginning of the year 1990 , diCorcia begins new experiments in its personal work. Hitherto, there had left the studio only for its professional work, its art having remained confined with a personal environment and completely controlled.

having obtained in 1989 a purse of State allotted by the National Endowment off the Arts, diCorcia goes several times to Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992 to photograph men male prostitutes on Santa Monica Boulevard with Hollywood. In what thus constitutes its first series of photographs: Hollywood , it continues to put in scene its images, while limiting its intervention. It photographs its models in their personal environment and thus creates, like says it Peter Galassi, of the scenarios representing the desperate phantasms of Hollywood of diCorcia.

In 1993 , it carries out the series Streetworks in which it photographs passers by surprised in the streets of world big cities (London, Naples, Paris, New York…). While starting without preventing flashes dissimulated with the sight of the passers by, its images are created by chance, the scene photographed being subjected randomly.

the series Heads realized in 2001 , can be close to Streetworks and the series Two Hours (11 photographs taken in two hours in the street with Havana). They are also people taken in photograph in the street, of scenes enlightened by the light of the flash. The faces of the passers by taken without their knowledge, are detached on a dark bottom.

In 2003 , diCorcia joins together 76 photographs taken these twenty last years and hitherto independent, in its work has Storybook Life . It is about a kind of album of memories, joining together its images reconstituting of ritual of the daily life but always dramatized, each image being able to be perceived as a starter of narration: the limits of reality and the fiction are thus scrambled with the center even of the private sphere.

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