Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. “I think it’s a sense of disappointment after realizing that most of the time they’re being lied to,” diCorcia has observed of his audience’s reaction to ambiguous nature of his photographs. “And what medium has a stronger relationship to people’s idea of the truth than one that is supposed to be an accurate representation of reality?” His cinematic approach echoes Gregory Crewdson’s methodology, wherein the artist prepares the shots as if they were scenes in a film, as seen in his series Hustlers. The “dramatizing elements,” as the artist calls them, are what gives his images their narrative power: his subjects are performers whose interior self can differ greatly from their projected selves. Born in 1951 in Hartford, CT, diCorcia studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received his MFA in 1979 from Yale University. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized his first solo museum exhibition in 1993, and 20 years later, he was the subject of a major retrospective survey organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. He currently lives and works in New York, NY. DiCorcia’s works are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
– artnet.com
