Philip-Lorca Dicorcia Research Paper

Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. He developed an interest in photography while he was attending the University of Hartford in the early 1970s. A couple years later he transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and graduated in 1975. He then continued his education at Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979.
But before all of that, Philip-Lorca diCorcia crashed out of high school and nearly died experimenting with drugs. Luckily, his fortunes changed when he picked up a camera at art school. When he was seventeen, he would steal other people’s belongings and trade them for heroin. He would also never show up to school. At one point, he gave the school a note saying that his absence was due to hepatitis. They then quarantined the school and called Philip’s father, which was the last straw. The following year he

In addition to pursuing his own work, diCorcia worked as a commercial photographer throughout the 1980s, creating spreads for publications including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar. Between 1990 and 1992, he spent his time in Los Angeles, working on his Hollywood series, in which the artist paid prostitutes, hustlers, and drug addicts to pose for him in his characteristically staged, orchestrated images. diCorcia would title each photograph with the name and age of his subject, as well as how much he paid them to sit for the photograph. In later works, he photographed crowds on the streets of cities, from New York and Paris to Tokyo, placing flashbulbs at several places around a site and then waiting for the ideal moment to capture a photograph of an unknowing group. In recent series, such as East of Eden, he has focused on subjects ranging from pole dancers to New York’s urban