Philip Lorca Di Corsia

PHILIP LORCA DI CORCIA

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 Tokyo, 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.

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