With his latest New York gallery exhibition, Philip-Lorca diCorcia leaves behind his persona as the mastermind of large-scale, spookily artificial, more or less staged photographs and emerges as a real flesh-and-blood artist. The change feels especially big because it is brought about by many extremely small images — 1,000 Polaroids — instead of his signature wall-size ones.
Technically perfect, highly personal, full of life, these images were culled from more than 4,000 taken by Mr. diCorcia over the last 25 years. They are installed edge to edge on a narrow aluminum shelf that wraps around the gallery and into a spiral of specially built walls that add a spatial tension to viewing the show.
All the basic art historical (and photographic) conventions are encompassed here — interiors, nudes, still lifes, portraits, landscapes, street scenes and so on — along with many of life’s experiences, such as travel, work, friends, lovers, children, solitude. All are governed by an ever-alert eye and an instinctive compositional sense. Fleeting moments are deftly captured, like a book-size piece of plywood upright on a table that splits the reflected light between two empty chairs.
Some images are test shots for Mr. diCorcia’s various photographic series, most memorably his portraits of male prostitutes in Los Angeles. Several appear two and three times, but are slightly different shots of the same subject.
The Polaroids are carefully ordered, loosely grouped in chapters or around themes — a series of individuals half-visible in darkened rooms, a sequence of emphatically receding shots taken down alleyways or between houses. There are compositional idiosyncrasies, like photographs of reflections in mirrors on otherwise dark walls. The resulting images are framed in deep borders of black, making them even smaller and finer.
Continue reading the main story The effect is both magical and mundane. The images’ jewel-like clarity contrasts with the day-in-the-life casualness of their circumstances. As you move past them, you may feel that each one deserves to be savored on its own rather than as part of a 1,000-piece work. Some savoring might have been possible in the thick book that reproduces them all in the same order as in the installation, but the blurry printing on soft paper destroys their most enticing quality, which is their startling outsize sharpness.