more Philip-Lorca DiCorcia
I went to his art-talk at LACMA this evening. After going at the show last week, I had the same nagging question Chuck Klosterman had upon embarking upon his interview with Bono. Is DiCorcia for real? Or is Dicorcia full of shit?
And fuck it all, he was totally cool, and challenged my old-fashioned postmodern ideas about the relationship between photography and chance.
The talk was held in the Bing Auditoriu, a large, wood-paneled theatre. And the house was packed. I had no idea DiCorcia was so popular. One of the more popular images from the exhibit was projected onto the screen on the stage, and, while the house filled, I was reminded of what I liked about the photographs. The light. He does really strange and interesting things with light. It’s so…*strange. I couldn’t figure out what time of day it was…the faces of the subjects are ghostly…
Dicorcia was tall and thin, white, with a short crew cut and three-day stubble. He drank coffee (?) from a small paper cup, and wore a suit and sandals…but the sandals worked. I don’t know…He had nice feet, maybe. During the talk, he said “Ummm,” a lot, and was very expressive with his hands, though the rest of his body remained fairly still.
Previously, I was both drawn to and skeptical of his Hustlers series. But tonight, DiCorcia explained the process by which the photos were taken. From what I could gather, each shot was first staged, and then DiCorcia found a hustler on the street to be a model. Someone in the audience asked why he didn’t show the hustlers having sex. His answer was that he was more interested in their brands, how they presented themselves as products. “There’s enough pictures of people having sex,” he said.
I liked that.
It eradicated my previous questions about the relationship between his photos and authenticity.
I also liked his ideas about the relationship between control and photography.
Hustlers, Lucky 13, and Heads were all shot after quite a bit of fiddling with lights and f-stops and shutter speeds and lens lengths. DiCorcia was not shy at all about how he arranged his images. It seems as though he creates these boundaries to catch spontanious moments, which, because of the amount of control that went into the construction of the photo, are nearly hyper-real.
He was interesting, and his talk relieved my skepticism, as well as suggested ideas about the relationship between a photo and reality that I hadn’t considered before.
I am tired and incoherent and a little drunk. Tomorrow is the new job orientation. Huzzah!
