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Street fare: the photography of Philip-Lorca Dicorcia
ArtForum, Feb, 1999 by Andy Grundberg
Inasmuch as movies seem to wag real events these days, it's not much of a stretch to see Philip-Lorca diCorcia's recent color photographs of crowded city streets as film stills of everyday life. They certainly have the look: Artificially lit from off-camera sources that supplement natural daylight (the faces of certain passersby are highlighted more than others), these mise-en-scenes of pedestrians around the world have a nail-polish glossiness straight out of Hollywood. All that's missing is the glamour. Instead of shooting recognizable stars and designer sets, diCorcia captures anonymous, unintentional actors as they move, zombielike, through gritty, hyperactive asphalt and concrete spaces.
The exhibition announcement for diCorcia's recent show at PaceWildenstein suggested that the nineteen pictures on view, which superficially resemble the sort of staged, pseudo-documentary photography he has practiced for much of this decade, were a response to the "cinematization" of modern life - a useful neologism in this instance (and in the case of the modern presidency). What the word doesn't speak to - but diCorcia's pictures do - is the sense of alienation, both psychological and political, that accompanies this phenomenon. The people in the photographs wear the same pinched-brow, heavy-lidded, out-of-it expressions that Bill Clinton showed us the day before the House voted to impeach him. Exiting from subway stairs and office buildings, talking on cellular phones, diCorcia's subjects seem detached, atomized, affectless. Even in those pictures where there is interpersonal communication, as when two New Yorkers seem to greet each other while screened by a passerby, the interaction is unclear and inconclusive. Mostly, diCorcia concentrates on conjunctions of people who seem to be encased in their own private bubbles, much in the manner of Garry Winogrand's and Joel Meyerowitz's street photographs taken twenty-five years ago.
Meyerowitz did his street work in color, too, which makes his images one obvious antecedent for diCorcia's fairly large (30-by-40-inch) prints. But a more apt point of comparison might be the recent photographs of Jeff Wall. Wall's pictures are larger and more controlled - he sets up narrative socio-dramas using settings and characters of his own choosing - but they convey the same feeling of hyperreality. In Wall's pictures, the implied narratives are heavily encoded, summoning art-historical references and often pointing directly to issues of immigration, labor, race, gender, and the like. In diCorcia's case, the scenes are less controlled and therefore the meanings are less programmatic and more contingent. What are we to make of diCorcia's picture (Tokyo, 1998) of a young man talking on a cell phone, his dressed-for-shopping girlfriend standing still beside him, while pedestrians rush past and a billboard-sized video screen beams images down to the street? Or of Mexico City, 1998, in which a businessman coming up from the subway is juxtaposed with a woman street vendor whose kiosk is at the top of the stairs? As is true of all of the photographs on view, diCorcia's meaning seems immanent yet ultimately inscrutable.
The same could be said of the now-classic street photography of Meyerowitz, Winogrand, et al., except they worked with the assurance that we would interpret their pictures as genuine slices of life, "decisive moments" - to quote Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous phrase - seized from the flow of real time. Not so with diCorcia, however. Here we must ask how much of a given work is staged to look real, as in cinema, and how much of it is truly (or merely) real. This is territory that has been explored in recent years not only by diCorcia and Wall, but by Tina Barney and Beat Streuli. These artists work along a spectrum of realism that ranges from the purely candid to the totally tableau. DiCorcia's position is somewhere in the middle. In his LA-street-hustler series of the early '90s, for example, boys assumed realistic poses in realistic settings, but their performances were purchased by the artist, assuring his control. In this new work, from the last three years, he forgoes actually posing his subjects but retains control of the setting and, most obviously, the lighting.
One of diCorcia's principal interests would seem to be documenting the nearly total homogenization of cultural behavior in urban settings, which may explain why he has traveled to cities around the world only to make distinct places look the same. The titles tell you where you are: Berlin, Calcutta, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Tokyo. But the settings - the architecture, signage, and sidewalks - are more or less interchangeable; only the pedestrians have features that distinguish one place from another. One assumes diCorcia intends this paradoxical contrast between the uniformity of contemporary urban experience and the particularity of his individual subjects, since it is reflected in his choice of locales, on the one hand, and his eye for peculiar gestures, expressions, and body language, on the other.
