Philip-Lorca diCorcia made headlines in 2007 when he was sued by Erno Nussenzweig, a Hasidic Jew, who objected to his portrait being displayed in a New York art gallery. For his 1999 series Heads, DiCorcia attached a strobe light to scaffolding in New York's Times Square and positioned a hidden camera nearby to shoot people as they walked beneath. Nessenzweig was one of those unsuspecting subjects. He lost the court case and DiCorcias's melancholy street portrait of him is one of several hauntingly powerful images in the US photographer's first British retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield.
The Heads shots came six years after another series that was just as controversial. In Hustlers, DiCorcia cruised a strip of LA's Santa Monica Boulevard where rent boys worked, and offered to shoot their portraits for the same hourly rate they charged for sex. As the years have gone by, both Hustlers and Heads seem more and more important, merging the staged and the natural, the cinematic and the intimate. If you have never seen these images in person, I urge you to make the journey to Wakefield. Like Jeff Wall's work, which also has elaborate staging, they need to be seen in a gallery to experience the full force of their luminous melancholy.
In Heads, for instance, an adolescent boy in a baseball cap is, as DiCorcia put it in his artist's tour of the show earlier this week, "pure Holden Caulfield". Next to him, a young girl is freeze-framed with "a perfect Botticelli wind blowing through her hair". Both seem oddly unreal in the way that many of DiCorcia's portraits are: they emerge out of the darkness with other ghostly faces dancing around them, each lost in their own reverie. Though the context is set up, the results capture the intimate naturalism of faces picked out in the hustle and bustle of New York streets, but the clamour of Times Square is silenced by the darkness that lies just beyond this cinematic lighting.
There's a deeper melancholy about Hustlers that is not just to do with the desperate nature of street prostitution, but more with the way the subjects pose – often looking off into the distance – and the way their loneliness is accentuated by the dreamy light and neon romance of Los Angeles. DiCorcia eschews digital technology, shooting on film and printing on high-end inkjet, and his colours often have an oddly nostalgic feel that recalls the soft gleam of Kodachrome.