True Colours: Photographer 5 | Philip-Lorca diCorcia

DiCorcia's work usually involves intensive planned staging to take everyday occurrences contained with strong emotion into his frames. His work are categorized as documentary photography with some fictional and cinematic aspects, creating a link between reality and fantasy.

In DiCorcia's early work, he likes to use his friends and family as the subject of his photograph to depict some spontaneous scenes that we encounter in our daily life. Though these photographs look like some random shots, they were carefully staged and planned beforehand. Dicarcia later started to photograph random people on the streets, such as Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo. He would often hide lights in the pavement to illuminate random subjects and isolate them from other people in the street.

DiCorcia's photographs favour me with the dramatic essence of random passers-by poses, insignificant facial expressions, and sometimes contented with black humor. The interpretation of these photographs are usually different depending on the viewer which offers free flow of imagination about the people being captured. This is one of reasons that I like shooting random people on the streets and DiCorcia is definitely one of the role models with great work, such as his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, and A Storybook Life.

The Hustlers series (1990-1992) has featured some male prostitutes at Los Angeles, shot against the backdrops of the AIDS pandemic in the late 1980s and early 90s. The latest awards winning movie, Dallas Buyers Club, has the similar backdrops that relate me to DiCorcia's work. The series was shot at the prearrange settings such as hotel room, vacant lot, in between cars, fast food restaurant and etc.