Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is among the most innovative and influential photographers working today. For nearly 30 years he has explored the intersection of documentary style with cinematic production, making contemporary work that perches uncannily between the fictional and the real. This survey of diCorcia’s career, from the late-1970s to the present, draws from the artist’s most acclaimed series, including Hustlers, Streetworks, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky 13. In work from the 1980s, diCorcia shows friends and family in domestic tableaux tinged with an air of mystery, working from the subject matter of his life but eschewing romantic intimacy for studied detachment and pitch-perfect detail. In the 1990s, he turns to the great American tradition of street photography. That swiftly-changing environment might have seemed unlikely for diCorcia’s meticulous style, but it provided some of his best-known images, including those of male prostitutes and anonymous crowds of urban pedestrians. In more recent work, he has photographed erotic pole dancers, their bodies caught in contorted and seductive free-fall. The accompanying texts here include a piece by the New York writer and critic, Lynne Tillman, author of the acclaimed 2006 novel, American Genius, A Comedy.