Philip Lorca Di Corcia was born in 1953, in Hatford, Connecticut. He studied with Jan Groover who taught him a new approach to photography that included not only the recording of reality, but inventing another way for expressing his point of view. At the beginning Lorca Di corcia portrayed his family and his friends. He has never been a prolific photographer, he takes about a dozen shots a year. After graduating at Yale, in New York, in the 80s he worked for travel and fashion magazines. Di Corcia learned from those commissions to represent reality like fiction, in a more fascinating way than the truth. When the N.E.A. awarded a Grant to Lorca Di Corcia in 1989 to recognize his works, there was full debate on Mapplethorpe\'\'s explicit photographs. Di Corcia, as others photographers too, was forced to limit his sharpness not to interrupt the fund he received.
Santa Monica Boulevard was the next stage to perform his pictures, a place where male transvestites, prostitutes, loafers take the scene. He chose the scenes and the persons before shooting photographs. He focused his attention on lights and details. The location were built in every details. The set being created like a cinematic stage set using many artificial lights and directing the persons as a filmmaker would do. Later he continued to look at the street life in big cities like Tokio, New York, Berlin, Mexico City and other cities, remaining coherent to his work and his poetic. Di Corcia doesn\'\'t look at the events with irony, but with cynic eyes, and returns us the images he has felt part of, consciously. The reality for Di Corcia is always an unknown that astonishes in positive or in negative. Photography for him is an elusive medium and a discloser at the same time, which renders the viewer active witness, narrator of what they are looking at, and free to be led by the events recorded by the camera towards the other side of the truth.
Loretta Zaganelli
"In the sense that the part represents the whole I am interested in society at large... The most consistent conclusion I have drawn in my travels is that no one really knows what’s going on -it is apathy and self- preservation which define the socio-political aspect of the cities and their societies. Subjectivity becomes a conforting trap. It obsessively focuses on the self as a strandard for an exterior reality , which exists only in the mind. Psychology is reality for many people. I try to show this. It may not, in fact, be the actual psychology of the subject that I portray, but it is played out in the image and the projection of that psychology into the surrounding space. The street does not induce people to shed their self- awareness? They seem to withdraw into themselves. They become less aware of their surroundings, seemingly lost within themselves. Their image is the outward facing front belied by the inwardly gazing eyes." (1) "Streetwork" has been featured in solo exhibitions at international venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; the Nikon Salon, Tokyo and at the 1997 Withney Biennal Exhibition, also at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (1) Taken from "Reflections on Streetwork", 1997.
