Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Born 1953 in Hartford, Connecticut) is recognized as one of the most influential and innovative photographers of his generation. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with photographers such as Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, becoming part of a collective known as “The Boston School.” DiCorcia’s photography navigates the boundary between fact and fiction by blending documentary practices with techniques used in staged photography. Often leaving the viewer unsure if a scene is found or posed, diCorcia presents seemingly mundane occurrences that go beyond the realm of the ordinary, giving them an uncanny quality. His work questions the assumed truth of a photograph and works to consider alternative ways images might speak to and represent reality.
Spanning the mid-1990s, diCorcia’s Streetworks series has helped to redefine the tradition of street photography. Taking up the legacy of American photographers like Walker Evans and Garry Winogrand, he photographs unsuspecting pedestrians along the sidewalks of places like Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and Paris. DiCorica turns pedestrians into performers and everyday street scenes into ad-hoc movie sets, using a large-format camera. He picks passers-by out of crowds, who, unaware of the camera, are deeply absorbed in thought or gaze absently. Enlarged and isolated, their expressions become mysterious, melodramatic, and sometimes touching.
London, part of diCorcia’s Streetworks series, shows a lone man in a dark suit on an empty patch of asphalt. Hands in pockets, lost in thought, he could be going to work or returning from it. With the details unknown, the scene is left a mystery, heightened by the shadows and dim light that surround him. London is relatively unique in the Streetworks series as it depicts a single figure rather than a mass of passers-by. But like other photographs in this group, it carries an existential, cinematic quality that has made diCorcia one of the most recognizable and imitated figures in contemporary photography.
