Biography
Born in 1951 in Connecticut, Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer working in New York. Her work links staged photography and documentary photography, thus mixing reality and fiction.
Taking an interest in photography during the 1970s, he began studying photography at the University of Hartford. Graduated in 1975 from the School of Museum of Fine Arts located in Boston, he later entered Yale University to study photography for two years. He graduated in 1981 and began his career as an assistant photographer. During the year 1984 he worked for magazines like Esquire. The field of the press will largely influence his art.
His photographs evoke in their very cinematographic composition the works of the American painter and engraver Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967). In addition, the composition of his photographs evokes the cinematographic environment to the spectators. Indeed, the staging of his photographs illustrate the methodology of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson (1962). The latter states the fact that the artist prepares each of his photographs as if it were really a scene from a film. The work of diCorcia is similar to that of Crewdson, both in composition and the way of taking the shot, and in the atmospheres experienced by the photographs.
To enable his photographs to be taken, Philip-Lorca diCorcia uses completely artificial light. The camera used is on a stand. The media and photographs in magazines influence the artist. Magazines and cinema are therefore two essential sources for all of his work, they allow him to create an atmosphere specific to each of his photographs.
Inspiration from cinema allows diCorcia's works to tell a story. The immortalized fertile moment gives each of his photographs a hypnotizing and inspiring narrative power for the viewer who can rethink a memory or a scene from a film already seen. The banal scenes of life take on a whole new meaning, they become more poetic, more intriguing, more inspiring. DiCorcia plays with the viewer and his vision. He thus blurs the line between fiction and reality and that between lie and truth.
In 2001, Philip-Lorca diCorcia received the Prize for Applied Photography. This award was created in 1985 and is part of the Infinity Awards awarded by the International Center of Photography in New York. Some of diCorcia's photographs are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Nationality