Philip-Lorca diCorcia is among the most innovative and influential photographers working today. For nearly 30 years he has occupied a crossroads in contemporary photography, challenging the documentary tradition with cinematically built images that perch uncannily between the fictional and the real. This book surveys all periods of diCorcia’s career, from the late 1970s to the present, with selections drawn from his most acclaimed series including “Hustlers”, “Streetworks”, “Heads”, “A Storybook Life”, and “Lucky 13”. The catalogue accompanies an exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston – the largest grouping of diCorcia’s work to date and the first United States museum presentation in 14 years.
DiCorcia’s photographs are marked by a poetry of flux and contingency. In work from the 1980s, he pictured his friends and family in domestic tableaux imbued with existential mystery. Though he made his images from the subject matter of his life, he eschewed romantic intimacy or expressive rawness in favor of studied detachment and pitchperfect detail. In the 1990s, diCorcia turned to the great American tradition of street photography. The street would seem an unlikely place for diCorcia’s meticulous style, and yet it provided him with some of his best-known images, including those of male prostitutes and anonymous crowds of urban pedestrians. In more recent work, he has photographed erotic pole dancers, their bodies caught in some contorted and seductive free-fall.

128 pages, 70 colour plates
20.3 cm x 27.9 cm
Flexible hardcover
Steidl & Partners