Installation view, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
David Zwirner is pleased to reopen its Paris gallery with an exhibition of photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The exhibition will feature images from a series of eleven editorial projects that the artist created for W magazine between 1997 and 2008, including several photographs that have never been exhibited before.
In 1997, diCorcia began traveling around the world to produce the photographic essays in collaboration with W magazine's creative director, Dennis Freedman. Depicting his own models as well as people cast on the spot, these images weave together richly loaded narratives and sometimes appear far removed from the fashion industry’s traditional emphasis on formulaic beauty and harmony.
Instead, they involve a delicate balance between glamour and grit, imagination and irony. Photographing in Bangkok, Cairo, Havana, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, São Paulo, and St. Petersburg, diCorcia created distinctive series that are rife with ambiguous meanings and loaded connotations as characters appear and reappear in myriad settings.
Image: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, W, September 2000, #7, 1997
“In the early 1990s Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed a world of secrets and escapes, lives lived apart from the formalities of society and fashion….One can call these photographs incidental illuminations….The locations are places one finds in movies or novels in which the main character is a traveler but these are real places and what’s important is the implicit diCorcian drama.”
—Mary Gaitskill, excerpted from Philip-Lorca
diCorcia: Eleven
“I walked around with a cumbersome camera all over the world, and I learned that you don’t follow the script....They’re really happy when they get what they didn’t expect.”
—Philip-Lorca diCorcia
“What unifies these works, some of which feature overlapping or recurring “characters,” is a sense of enclosure and surveillance, which makes it seem like we are glancing into hidden worlds, and the subjects—many of them walled off in glass houses—seem to know as much. These scenes in turn feel incredibly, even unsettlingly, familiar, as if we’ve stumbled into an old film or a family photo album.’’
—Ian Bourland, Artforum
Installation view, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
Installation view, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
Installation view, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020
”It’s the image that counts and Philip-Lorca diCorcia is one photographer who knows... The fashion spreads he created for W magazine from 1997 through 2008 are lavish productions that don’t just illustrate a moment in style but tell a story about representation itself.’’
—Linda Yablonsky, The New York Times
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, W, May 2008, #16, 2008 (detail)
“It’s kind of like setting a trap for somebody. You need to lead them into what is the substance of the image.” —Philip-Lorca diCorcia
“In all of those pictures, I had an idea of what the scenario was….There is a critique. The critique is not of the fashion world. It’s of the world in general.’’
—Philip-Lorca diCorcia
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