Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #23, 2001. Courtesy of the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Cuba, n.d.Deutsche Bank Collection. © Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Eddie Anderson, 21 years old, Houston, Texas, $ 20, 1990-92
Fujicolor Crystal Archive print 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm) Courtesy
the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Lola, 2004. Courtesy the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, The Hamptons, 2008. David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Ike Cole, 38 years old, Los Angeles, California, $ 25, 1990-92. © Courtesy of the artist und David Zwirner, New York und Sprüth Magers, London/Berlin
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, New York City, 1996. Courtesy of the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Norfolk, 1979. Courtesy the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sylmar, California, 2008. Courtesy the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Wellfleet, 1993. Courtesy of the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca di Corcia, London, n.d. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #10, 2001. Courtesy the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Hong Kong, 1996. Courtesy the artist und David Zwirner, New York/London
|
|
|
Again and again, Katharina Dohm had to leaf through the illustrated book, which is now out of print. From front to back, and then back to front. A Storybook Life—a book of images by the American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia taken between 1975 and 1999 left the curator of the Schirn Kunsthalle
in Frankfurt no peace. “Something grabbed me and at the same time
disturbed me,” she said. “And so I flew to New York and convinced
diCorcia to do this exhibition.” The result is that the storybook life
now unfolds in the Schirn, where it’s like walking through a photo
book. From the beginning, where the artist’s somewhat frail father is
watching TV in bed, to the end, where he lies in a casket in front of
several empty rows of chairs. In between are 74 pictures in which
diCorcia recorded friends and relatives in banal everyday situations.
The brother renovating a ceiling, a woman ironing, a friend resting his
punctured arm on a typewriter, as though he were about to begin typing.
The images feel like documentary snapshots, and yet all of it is
staged. These are moments frozen in motion that have no before and
after. The woman will never finish her ironing and the friend will
never write a novel. And despite this, the viewer still searches for a
story behind the people, maybe even a “life story,” as the title of the
series suggests. But it doesn’t exist.
“I think it’s more the enigma, the suggestion of the story that is
intriguing to people,” diCorcia explains. “If they went further I don’t
know if they would be interested.” Yet storytelling is something he is
very familiar with. He had originally wanted to become a filmmaker.
“During my time at art school I was very interested in film. I was
interested on an aesthetic level, but just as much on an emotional
level. Film's capacity to suspend disbelief and it affective power were
and are something I admire,” he reports. Indeed, many of his
photographs resemble film stills: they’re sharply lit and clearly
staged. “That’s right. But films are not about style, they’re about a
narrative. And the stories I sometimes make up about the people in my
pictures are not strong enough for a screen book.”
DiCorcia’s most recent series, East of Eden,
has an obvious fictional reference. Not only because the title refers
to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve, and the expulsion from Paradise. East of Eden is also the title of a famous Steinbeck novel—magnificently filmed with James Dean, who portrays the dark side of the American dream in an allusion to the story of Cain and Abel, in 1955. But East of Eden
also has a very real basis: “It was really about the loss of innocence
I think the whole world went through when the financial crisis started.
The financial crisis was the beginning of an economic crisis that led
to a political crisis. It took two administrations to learn that the
war on Iraq was based on a lie, that Saddam Hussein didn’t work
together with Al-Qaida, and that Afghanistan was an impossible country
to transform. Now we have natural disasters that we never could have
imagined before. And then there are all those people with no homes. I
did feel some compulsion to respond. I never respond directly. But I
had a distinct motivation for the conceptualization of the imagery.”
In the East of Eden images, the symbolism looks pretty dismal. Adam
and Eve are a blind pair, he is black and she is white, and they are
surrounded by what they’ve managed to hold onto in life—a modest home
and a white Labrador. For diCorcia, the fact that the two are blind not
only means that they can only participate in life to a limited degree;
they have also lost a glimpse of paradise. “Blind people don’t dream.
At least if they are blind since birth. They don’t have these floating
images that we have in our dreams.” And diCorcia staged another version
of Adam and Eve: in an all-white luxury apartment, two white
thoroughbred dogs are staring at a porn video on TV. A moment of
realization? A loss of innocence? Symbol of a perverted greed for
luxury?
The problems America is suffering from are even more acute in his picture Iolanda:
financial crisis, national debt, natural catastrophe. The skyscrapers
of New York, those symbols of growth and prosperity—how absurd, and as
what delusions of grandeur they must seem to the woman looking out from
her hotel window. On TV, the next tornado is already spinning towards
the city, but the woman is gazing at the tranquil skyline, with her
reflection superimposed on the plate glass window.
DiCorcia has already used the device in earlier works, where he
introduces a second level in the image by inserting a TV. One of the
series Hustlers, in which he photographed male prostitutes in the early ’90s around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, is Gerald Hughes (a.k.a. Savage Fantasy), about 25 years old, Southern California, $50.
Gerald poses in a motel room wearing a bikini bottom with a keychain
hanging from it. His black muscular body glows in the light of a
television set broadcasting the Bill Cosby
Show—the first American series to feature upper middle-class African
Americans. A stark contrast to the man who charges a mere 50 dollars
for his services and whose name, Savage Fantasy, speaks to the cliché of the “wild” black man.
DiCorcia is especially interested in people stuck on the bottom rungs
of the social ladder. Outsiders, the poor and blind, prostitutes. This
can also be seen his series of 2004, Lucky 13,
whose title alludes to the American saying about how a streak of bad
luck should finally come to an end. In a club, he photographed naked
women pole dancing in acrobatic, erotic poses. Upside-down, their upper
body parallel to the ground, held solely by braces wrapped around the
pole. The slender bodies of the pole dancers shine white and smooth
against a bar background vanishing into darkness, almost like the
marble sculptures of fallen angels.
“That comes as a secondary result because of the lighting,” explains
diCorcia. “But it’s necessary because I’m making a visual object. I’m
not trying to offend people—visually at least. You are supposed to be
able to look at the picture one time, twice, several times. It’s not
like that kind of photography that goes ‘Boom’ and that’s it.” Indeed,
there is an even deeper level behind diCorcia’s images. For him, the
dancers are a metaphor for the people who fell from the towers of the
World Trade Center. Almost all of them are hanging upside-down, as
through they were falling. “I’m afraid of heights. The worst thing I
could possibly imagine is falling out of high towers. I felt like the
United States had made a kind of fetish about 9/11. So in my mind I put
it together. But Eros and Thanatos are always connected in mythology.
They are one side of the other.”
The 1951-born artist is often included in the Boston School together with David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson,
who like diCorcia studied photography in Boston in the seventies. The
concepts often cited in this context are “snapshot aesthetic” and
“social outsider.” While there are common thematic and formal elements
in the work of these five artists, each of them has nonetheless
developed a highly individual photographic language. In any case,
diCorcia rigorously rejects this label. He became known with his series
Streetworks
(1993–1999), in which he shot unwitting passersby on the way to work,
at home, shopping, or while engaged in sports. As in the “Hustler”
series, diCorcia first carefully chooses the location, camera position,
and composition; he lights his sets with elaborate set-ups. He then
documents everything in Polaroid. And then the passersby randomly enter
this film set-like arrangement and trigger the “shot.”
DiCorcia’s favorite work is Cuba from 1999, which can currently be seen as a part of the Deutsche Bank Collection in the exhibition Stadt in Sicht (City in View) in the Dortmunder U.
A second print is hanging in the exhibition in Frankfurt. “I was in
this spot with a camera on a tripod for two hours before it started to
rain,” relates diCorcia. “But when I looked at the eleven shots I took
later, it seemed unusual because there was a lot within this small
little street happening in these two hours. So I made a series of it. Cuba
is actually my favorite one. Maybe because it just seems so
incongruous. It’s probably cruel, but the woman on the site has
enormous hips. And the man on the left is short and has crippled legs.
The fact that he looks at her almost with desire I found interesting
enough that it was demeaning to either one of them.”
Or London, also from the Deutsche Bank Collection and on view in
Dortmund: a solitary businessman walks through the city of London. The
streets and sidewalks are completely empty, although it’s the middle of
the day. What is strange, however, is that the man is wearing
headphones, which were not yet standard equipment for the modern
big-city dweller in the late ’90s. He is deaf to the world, even though
his surroundings are already empty and quiet. For diCorcia, this is a
significant phenomenon of our time: “I feel like this is a kind of
self-absorption. Those devices isolate people from what’s around them.
I’m even sure of it because I ride a bicycle in New York City and
people listening to their Ipod or Iphone or whatever with earbuds are
dangerous. They don’t pay attention to anything other than themselves.”
The distance from Streetworks to diCorcia’s next series Heads
(2000–2001) isn’t all that far. Instead of a hectic street scene in its
entirety, he focuses his spots and camera on a single person. An old
woman is hiding beneath her rain hat, a pimply teenager stares into
space, a black security guard gazes at the floor in resignation. No one
looks into the camera, because no one notices it. And despite this, one
feels one can see something characteristic in these faces, something
genuine and intimate. Even if the person portrayed has passed by a
fraction of a second later. This shakes up the whole concept of
classical portrait photography. After all, what is a carefully
prepared, well-staged portrait worth if just as much can be recognized
in a snapshot of a stranger?
It was precisely this element of “recognition” that proved uncanny to
one of the people portrayed, an Orthodox rabbi. He recognized himself
in an exhibition of diCorcia’s works and sued the photographer because
he saw his right to privacy and freedom to practice his religion
violated. But diCorcia won the case—as an artist. Yet he nonetheless
distances himself from this title: “There is something quite
sanctimonious in the word artist. Like they are a special breed. There
is this famous Picasso quote that art is the lie that reveals the
truth. But I just don’t believe that artists have some special
connection to the truth. That may have been true for a few geniuses
over the centuries. But in fact today most art is made for some very
practical reasons: to decorate a bank lobby or for the ego of a hedge
fund manager.”
When one takes another look at the images from the series East of Eden,
new ideas come to mind. As ever, the Marlboro Man is riding his horse
through the prairie. It could all be so very beautiful. But the land
where milk and honey once flowed has been burnt to the ground. Eve, as
stiff and pretty as a Barbie doll, stands frozen beneath a tree. In
reality, even the apple tree that diCorcia made so dense and abundant
with the help of Photoshop that even eternity didn’t seem to have
anything on it, no longer stands. A hurricane ripped it right out of
the ground. There could hardly be a more emblematic image for the death
of the American dream—and doesn’t it contain en element of truth?
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Photographs 1975 – 2012
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
Through September 8, 2013
|
