De Pont museum of contemporary art presents Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photographs 1975-2012 on view 5 October 2013 – 19 January 2014.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia first came to prominence in the 1970s with photographs that defied definition, existing in the space between documentary fact and movie-style fiction. The meticulous staging of quotidian scenes of family and friends lent the images an unparalleled sense of heightened drama and ambiguity. In the 1990s diCorcia turned his focus from scenes of domesticity to the American tradition of street photography exemplified by photographers such as Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand. In a seminal series that was retrospectively entitled ‘Hustlers’, diCorcia photographed men who had moved to Hollywood seeking their fortune, only to find themselves working the Sunset Strip as male prostitutes.
2007 saw the publication of ‘Thousand’ with Steidl Dangin, a compilation of 1,000 actual-size reproductions of diCorcia’s Polaroids that instantly brought a new element of diCorcia’s artistic practice into relief. Throughout diCorcia’s work he has used the Polaroid format to augment his photographic projects and with this publication he was able to showcase this technique for the first time. Whilst some of the images were taken as test shots to check lighting and composition, other scenes were conceived specifically to be taken only in Polaroid format, as an entirely separate endeavour. The exhibition, which has been organised together with Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, shows work from diCorcia’s most recognised series -‘Hustlers’, ‘Streetwork’, ‘Heads’, ‘A Storybook Life’, ‘Lucky Thirteen’, and images from his ongoing series ‘East of Eden’. www.depont.nl