Grace Walker VCU Senior Port: Philip-Lorca diCorcia

DiCorcia was born in Hartford, Conneticut in 1951. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. He then went to Yale, where he recieved a Masters of Fine Art in photography. DiCorcia’s style can be said to be a mix between informal snapshots and staged compositions. “Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations” (Wikepedia). This style probably developed out of diCorcia’s earlier career, where he would take family and friends and place them in fictional interior tableaus, making the viewer think that they were snapshots of the everyday life, when in fact they were staged photos. DiCorcia then moved on to photographing random people in urban spaces around the world. He achieved this by hiding lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a unique way, separating them from everyone else who happened to be on the same street. These photographs give “a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity” (Wikepedia). DiCorcia currently lives and works in New York.