Philip-Lorca diCorcia

                Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer who was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut.  DiCorcia’s childhood was tumultuous with a mentally unstable mother.  At 17, he was kicked out of school and soon after developed an addiction to drugs.  This led to an overdose after which he decided to enroll in art school in Boston.  He graduated from the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1975 and then received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale university in 1979.

                During his time at school, he developed his photographic style by first deciding the kind of photographer he did not want be.  Dicorcia wanted to push against the notion that photography was meant to capture a ‘specific moment of time from a specific point of view.’   Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Tod Papageorge were among some those mid twentieth century artist that held on to this notion.  They would quickly shoot many exposures in order to produce a handful of final images.  DiCorcia contrasted this technique by carefully orchestrating everyday moments with a theatrical style.  Carefully organizing his subjects, lighting and framing with in his photographs, he gives the audience a suggestion of a narrative rather than the full story.  He also utilized color, which was unusual during his time as a student and beginning of his career, within his photos.  DiCorcia wanted his images to “look like generic vernacular stuff rather than art photography.”