Philip-Lorca diCorcia, ELEVEN, Saturday, February 10-March 5, 2011 @ David Zwirner
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, ELEVEN, Saturday, February 10-March 5, 2011 @ David Zwirner
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of fashion photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. On view at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space, the works were selected from a series of eleven editorial projects the artist created for W magazine between 1997 and 2008. This is the first time diCorcia will exclusively exhibit his fashion photography in New York, which not only occupies an inspirational and improvisational role within his thirty-year-long career as an art photographer, but which also helped redefine the genre as a whole. DiCorcia is particularly well-known for his carefully planned and meticulously executed photographs involving family members and a variety of “actors,” including anonymous strangers, pole dancers, and street hustlers. Over the past decades, he has been influential in reinventing the genre of street photography and the photographic notion of the “decisive moment” popularized by Henri Cartier-Bresson in the early 20th century. Deploying characters in preconceived yet seemingly random poses and contexts, diCorcia’s photographs are far from candid snapshots, but rather explore the idea of the “indecisive moment” and revolve around a tension between the casual and the posed, the accidental and the fated. The tableaux-like, monumental quality, which envelops diCorcia’s broader oeuvre provides an intimate match with the contrived, theatrical nature of the fashion shoot. Together with W magazine’s long-time creative director Dennis Freedman
(now the creative director of Barneys New York), diCorcia traveled to distinct locations around the world to produce his photographic essays. Employing his own models as well as people cast on the spot, his images weave together richly loaded narratives with a stylist’s selection of designer-brand clothes. These narratives sometimes appear far removed from the fashion industry’s traditional emphasis on formulaic beauty and harmony, and instead involve a delicate balance between glamour and
grit, imagination and irony.
