Philip-Lorca diCorcia by Geoff Dyer

by Geoff Dyer

The seductive and eerie photography of diCorcia from 1975 to the ongoing East of Eden series The photography of Philip-Lorca diCorcia achieves a marvelous balance of artifice and the everyday. Over the past three decades, diCorcia has developed a unique and influential style, in which a realistic, almost documentary style of representation is subverted or countered by visibly staged composition. This combination of seemingly opposite qualities endows his images with a mysterious eeriness. In his Hustlers series (1990–1992), diCorcia made portraits of male prostitutes in minutely composed settings, and for Heads (2000–2001)--probably his most famous series--he depicted passersby on the street in New York (who were oblivious to his photographing them) as though they were film stars. Alongside the series Streetwork (1993–1999), Lucky 13 (2004) and A Storybook Life (1975–1999), this volume, published for a major European retrospective and produced in close collaboration with diCorcia, also features works from his new and ongoing East of Eden project.

Genres: Photography, Art

Unknown Binding

First published September 30, 2013

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Heath McKenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

We can discuss the beauty and curiosity of the photos all day regarding diCorcia. Unfortunately, his work is poorly served in this edition. The design itself is the issue here. Considering the fact that diCorcia shoots horizontal, and this book, with only a few notable exceptions is entirely horizontal, I can't for the life of me understand why the editors would choose to print the book in vertical format. Many of the shots are sized to fit on one page, but there are a great number which were printed as full spreads across both pages and thereby dropping into the gutter. This, of course, is not terribly uncommon (though still inexplicable to me), but the problem here is that there are several shots in which the two pages aren't even aligned through the gutter and details are often lost down there.
Again, the work of diCorcia is brilliant as always, but the editors have performed a great disservice in their design choices.