One thing to love about fashion is its extravagance. Fashion wouldn’t be fashion without it. What matters is the look. It has to dazzle the eye before anything else, and so do the photographs that sell it. It’s the image that counts and Philip-Lorca diCorcia is one photographer who knows from imagery. 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.
In the 11 years diCorcia collaborated with Dennis Freedman, the magazine’s former creative director (and now Barneys creative director), no penny was spared to set the clothes of each period in a context that casts a seductive spell of its own. Each photo essay features diCorcia’s distinctive, Caravaggio-like lighting and is set in a different part of the world — Bangkok, Cairo, São Paulo, Havana, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and East Hampton. The settings are often surreal and as different as a hotel hallway, a sweat shop, a Cuban bar straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, a white-shoe church, a kickboxing ring and Windows on the World, the restaurant that once sat atop the World Trade Center.
A choice selection of the photographs make up “Eleven,” diCorcia’s new exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, but they are all collected in a new book edited by Freedman, also entitled “Eleven,” that features a new story by the novelist Mary Gaitskill and an interview with diCorcia by the artist Jeff Rian, an editor of “Purple.” (Freedman and diCorcia will both be at the gallery tomorrow from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for a book signing.)
Each photograph derives from a tale that diCorcia concocted for the shoots, but separated from the magazine where the stories originally appeared, it is his gift as an image maker that stands out, not the fashions that were his subjects. In one striking picture from the Cairo shoot, there is no designer wear in evidence; the models are a local boy and his grandmother, and the only object in focus is a bouquet of artificial flowers.