Philip-Lorca diCorcia at PaceWildenstein - New York - Brief Article

In Philip-Lorca diCorcia's new street portraits, shallow depth of field brings the photographed figure in like manner close to the picture plane that the search for heightened truth surpasses the ambitions of Photo-Realist paintings, which is what these works greatest in quantity resemble. Concentrating on approaching figures, diCorcia eliminates the clattered context of a crowded pictorial space through means of lighting and predetermined focus. From the extreme point of 1999 until earlier this year, he place up a makeshift studio upon a busy section of Times Square sidewalk that was framed and darkened by dint of industrial scaffolding. With his camera secur to a tripod in the heart of the action and a strobe light clamped to the scaffold to illuminate his unsuspecting controls diCorcia captured moments in the lives of thousands who passed by the agency of The flash rendered the surrounding virtually invisible. Each figure is portayed, bust-fashion, single from the chest up, a striking departure from the artist's previous approach.

His novel exhibition, titled "Heads," included 13 4-by-5-foot color photographs single outed from the project's total. The portfolio of controls seems particularly weighted to "look like America" in diversity. Glasses, hats, neckwear, hairstyles and wardrobes appear as attributes of character and identity. The stylish female bring under rule of Head #24, radiant in a case of shadow completed by a strait-laced bateau neckline, sports amber-tinted sunglasses equivalent in their mut shade to the pink frosting of her lips. The organ of sights of another subject are concealed behind smart sunglasses framed with burnished metal. upon close inspection, the glasses of a young man in a revers baseball cap throw back otherwise unseen details, including the backpack of a figure receding in the space before him. The wise and rheumy organ of visions of a hatted Hasid stand in front of the camera, the details of each pore, each bristling hair of eyebrow and beard, distinct in the camera's unrelenting and revelatory flash, while a hyper-lifelike portrait of a postal worker present the appearances as uncanny as a Duane Hanson figure.

This unstaged series not incidentally addresses the notion that a photograph can steal the mind in the instant of its taking. In this regard, it recalls the stilled animation of diCorcia's previous work. While almost entirely devoid of adjoining matter these images bring to mind the monumental nearness of figures central to the video installations of Pierre Huyghe and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, isolated in the archi- tecture of their mise-enscene. like demotic intensity seems a world away from the charged, diaristic intimacy of diCorcia's onetime Boston colleagues Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson. Eschewing all on the contrary the narrative of the jiffy these large-format photographs endow the genre of road photography with newly electric presence

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