About the Work
Immediately recalling iconic still lifes such as Van Gogh’s Irises, diCorcia’s redolent capturing of these delicate purple flowers feels like you are viewing them through tears in your eyes—as if they are almost too beautiful to bear. A testimony to diCorcia’s expertise in manipulating and rendering light to create the enduring out of the ephemeral, these flowers are a reminder to look for the magnificent in the mundane.
About the Artist
A celebrated contemporary photographer, Philip-Lorca diCorcia creates images that exist between documentary and staged photography, like fictionalized documentary. His constructed narratives are very controlled, although at first glance they might be perceived as spontaneous tableaux. DiCorcia’s work borrows from the strategies of fashion, commercial, and advertising photography, and his pictures are technically admirable. Shooting in the Polaroid format, however, is unpredictable and implies spontaneity and intimacy. This inverts diCorcia’s tendency to work in his usually more removed style, showing rare moments of connectivity between the artist and his subject.
On his creative process, diCorcia says, “One of the things about Polaroid is that it’s not like a print—they don’t make it perfect. Sometimes you find yourself saying, ‘That’s close enough,’ or ‘Oh no, it came out all purple’… but I like that.” No wonder he has shot more than four thousand Polaroids over 25 years. Direct, honest, and often poetical observations of the quotidian, diCorcia's photographs are a narrative of personal experiences, like memories we discover in family photo albums.
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