He has admitted that some of the first subjects fleeced him out of more than
double the going rate, and professes he found the transaction process
awkward. ‘Most of them didn’t believe I only wanted to pay them for their
picture, they were like, “Is there anything else I can do for you?†At least
in part, the series was intended as a thorn in the side of the pervading
bigotry surrounding Aids (his brother Max died of an Aids-related disease).
DiCorcia is one of five children. He had a turbulent time growing up in the
home that his architect father built for the family. ‘Most of the parents
wouldn’t let their kids come to our house. You never knew what was going to
happen there, but it was always weird.’ He adds, ‘My mother walked [out].
She was certified mentally unstable. Do I remember her leaving? She was such
a disruptive part of mine and my whole family’s existence that I can’t say I
particularly missed her, put it that way.’
He was kicked out of school at 17. ‘I was stealing people’s stuff and selling
it. I’d give it to some junkie friend of mine who’d give me heroin… I was
crazy. I finally gave them a fake note saying my absence from class was due
to hepatitis – I had no idea that would have quarantined the school – they
called my father, and that was the last straw.’
Lynn and Shirley, Storybook Life, 1979. PHOTO: Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
Courtesy the artist, Sprueth Magers, Berlin/London and David Zwirner, New
York/London
The following year he overdosed after experimenting with belladonna and had a
psychotic reaction that led to a spell in a mental hospital. Of his two
companions who took it with him, one died. ‘It shook me in a way that put me
on the path to sorting my life out,’ he says. He enrolled in art school in
Boston where he started out making conceptual/performance pieces before
settling on photography. His first works were a study of suspense: normal
views of a room where an object is falling off the table or mantelpiece.
At the time, he was the only student to be using colour photography. ‘I did it
because I wanted it to look like generic vernacular stuff rather than art
photography. It was kind of unusual. When I arrived at Yale [in 1978, for
his MFA] they had no darkroom facilities for colour whatsoever.’
He moved to New York in 1981 and, apart from six months on a friend’s couch in
the South Street Seaport area where ‘everything stank of fish’, his working
base has always been in Tribeca. His friends refer to his 450 sq ft office
there as ‘the fishbowl’ since he removed every pane of window glass and
replaced it with an opaque substitute, so ‘you can’t see out, and people
can’t see in, but you still get all the light.’
Iolanda, East of Eden, 2011PHOTO: Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Courtesy the
artist, Sprueth Magers, Berlin/London and David Zwirner, New York/London
He married in 1987, and had a son in 1993, when the family decided to move to
Naples for a year ‘for all the reasons people usually avoid Naples – it’s
rough, chaotic, to some degree dangerous. But I didn’t want to feel like I
was retiring to Tuscany.’ The couple divorced a long time ago, but he and
his son, now 20, still see each other ‘all the time’.
He describes those early years trying to infiltrate the art scene as
‘difficult’. ‘The amount of momentum that is necessary to actually move
yourself along within the realm of art careers is quite a lot more than
people think.’ As a teacher at the Yale School of Art he is sometimes
disheartened by his students’ outlook: ‘Everybody thinks, ‘If I just get a
show, I’m rich and famous’, especially now, because social media is so much
of a driver, but it doesn’t work that way.’
Teaching, in fact, seems to have dampened his faith in the art world. ‘If
photography is in some way about the representation of reality, you don’t
see it any more. The last critique I was at, where four or five students
present their work in front of a panel, there was not a single photograph in
the usual sense. I mean, one woman made shoes.’
The exhibition of his work at Hepworth, Wakefield, part of the gallery’s new
focus on photography, includes examples from each of his major series.
Hustlers (1990- 92); Streetworks (1993-99), powerfully lit, happenstance
occasions on the streets of Tokyo, Calcutta and Mexico City; Lucky 13 (2004)
images of pole-dancers; Storybook Life (1975-99), unconnected images that
nevertheless explore the art of narrative; and Heads (2000-1), the series
for which he is most famous, where passers-by were caught alone and
mid-reverie by an elaborate overhead strobe light that seems in some cases
like the eye of God.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia. PHOTO: Norbert Miguletz © Schirn Kunsthalle
Frankfurt 2013
The show also includes his most recent series, East of Eden, which was
triggered by the financial crash of 2008. It pivots on the idea of the fall
of man, and our ensuing loss of innocence. Although many refer to
Steinbeck’s novel of the same name as having stimulated, or inspired the
photographs, in fact diCorcia intended the title to refer to the story of
Adam and Eve, who were cast out, east of Eden, when they came to true
knowledge. ‘I didn’t really think of the Steinbeck thing,’ he says.
‘Although I realised much later that it dovetails nicely with the work.’
For diCorcia, loss of innocence was ‘the realisation of what George Bush had
done. Not just with the crash, but the wars, how everybody believed him.’ At
first glance the Eden landscapes chime with the glorious tenor of the Hudson
River School, paintings that were meant to stand for the pioneer passion for
striving and salvation. However they contain a sly twist: on closer
inspection we see burnt out forests and fields, where the living, breathing
land is become ashes. A sense of cold, spent embitterment soon takes over.
The work, ‘was intentionally heterogeneous’ he says. ‘I sort
of stabbed this way, and stabbed that way and often failed to strike
anything, and it was a very frustrating experience but it was always driven
by that over-arching concept, the fall…You have it in your mind, your radar
is alert. It’s very hard to get beyond a middle level: you can make an
adequate image, but the ones that are special, those are the grace of god
things, for which I say, thank you.’
- Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Photographs 1975 – 2012 are on display from February
14 to June 1 at the Hepworth
Wakefield
Article source: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blogs/android/2012/10/08/hands-on-with-the-android-powered-coolpix-s800c-from-nikon/63897/
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