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Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA A R T I C L E BY L U C Y D AV I E S

KEY IMAGE On the eve of his first major retrospective in England Philip-Lorca di Corcia seems

He has admitted that some of the first subjects fleeced him out of more than

more concerned than flattered. ‘Superstitiously, I think most artists’ careers end

double the going rate, and professes he found the transaction process awkward.

up down the tubes after a retrospective,’ he says. ‘They really point out to you

‘Most of them didn’t believe I only wanted to pay them for their picture, they

what you’ve done, and some of that is not pleasant, because you can always find

were like, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” At least in part, the series was

something wrong with it.’

intended as a thorn in the side of the pervading bigotry surrounding Aids (his brother Max died of an Aids-related disease).

It’s strange to hear such self-deprecation from a man who is consistently referred to as one of the leading lights of his generation, an accolade that seems to amuse

DiCorcia is one of five children. He had a turbulent time growing up in the home

and frustrate him in equal measure.

that his architect father built for the family. ‘Most of the parents wouldn’t let their kids come to our house. You never knew what was going to happen there, but it

The Connecticut-born photographer, 62, first came to prominence in 1993 with

was always weird.’ He adds, ‘My mother walked [out]. She was certified mentally

a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hustlers was a stout-

unstable. Do I remember her leaving? She was such a disruptive part of mine and

hearted foray into the twitchy tenor of the post-Reagan era. DiCorcia sought

my whole family’s existence that I can’t say I particularly missed her, put it that way.’

out male prostitutes on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, offering them the money they would earn from having sex if he could shoot their portrait.

He was kicked out of school at 17. ‘I was stealing people’s stuff and selling it. I’d give it to some junkie friend of mine who’d give me heroin… I was crazy. I finally

‘At first I used motel rooms,’ he says, ‘because I had to set the shot up, and to do

gave them a fake note saying my absence from class was due to hepatitis – I had

it behind a closed door was a lot easier. But there were always problems with the

no idea that would have quarantined the school – they called my father, and that

management, and eventually I felt motel rooms had become a kind of leitmotif in

was the last straw.’

the whole thing – the mirrors, the bathroom, the bedspread – so I moved out on to the street.’

The following year he overdosed after experimenting with belladonna and had a psychotic reaction that led to a spell in a mental hospital. Of his two companions

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Mario, 1981 Chromogenic color print 17 3/8 x 23 1/4” (44.1 x 59 cm)

who took it with him, one died. ‘It shook me in a way that put me on the path to

Bruce and Ronnie, 1982 Chromogenic color print 15 3/4 x 22 15/16” (40.1 x 58.4 cm)

was not a single photograph in the usual sense. I mean, one woman made shoes.’

sorting my life out,’ he says. He enrolled in art school in Boston where he started out making conceptual/performance pieces before settling on photography. His

The exhibition of his work at Hepworth, Wakefield, part of the gallery’s new focus

first works were a study of suspense: normal views of a room where an object is

on photography, includes examples from each of his major series. Hustlers (1990-

falling off the table or mantelpiece.

92); Streetworks (1993-99), powerfully lit, happenstance occasions on the streets of Tokyo, Calcutta and Mexico City; Lucky 13 (2004) images of pole-dancers;

At the time, he was the only student to be using colour photography. ‘I did

Storybook Life (1975-99), unconnected images that nevertheless explore the art

it because I wanted it to look like generic vernacular stuff rather than art

of narrative; and Heads (2000-1), the series for which he is most famous, where

photography. It was kind of unusual. When I arrived at Yale [in 1978, for his MFA]

passers-by were caught alone and mid-reverie by an elaborate overhead strobe

they had no darkroom facilities for colour whatsoever.’

light that seems in some cases like the eye of God.

He moved to New York in 1981 and, apart from six months on a friend’s couch in the

The show also includes his most recent series, East of Eden, which was triggered

South Street Seaport area where ‘everything stank of fish’, his working base has always

by the financial crash of 2008. It pivots on the idea of the fall of man, and our

been in Tribeca. His friends refer to his 450 sq ft office there as ‘the fishbowl’ since he

ensuing loss of innocence. Although many refer to Steinbeck’s novel of the same

removed every pane of window glass and replaced it with an opaque substitute, so

name as having stimulated, or inspired the photographs, in fact diCorcia intended

‘you can’t see out, and people can’t see in, but you still get all the light.’

the title to refer to the story of Adam and Eve, who were cast out, east of Eden, when they came to true knowledge. ‘I didn’t really think of the Steinbeck thing,’

He married in 1987, and had a son in 1993, when the family decided to move to

he says. ‘Although I realised much later that it dovetails nicely with the work.’

Naples for a year ‘for all the reasons people usually avoid Naples – it’s rough, chaotic, to some degree dangerous. But I didn’t want to feel like I was retiring to

For diCorcia, loss of innocence was ‘the realisation of what George Bush had

Tuscany.’ The couple divorced a long time ago, but he and his son, now 20, still

done. Not just with the crash, but the wars, how everybody believed him.’ At first

see each other ‘all the time’.

glance the Eden landscapes chime with the glorious tenor of the Hudson River School, paintings that were meant to stand for the pioneer passion for striving

He describes those early years trying to infiltrate the art scene as ‘difficult’. ‘The

and salvation. However they contain a sly twist: on closer inspection we see burnt

amount of momentum that is necessary to actually move yourself along within the

out forests and fields, where the living, breathing land is become ashes. A sense

realm of art careers is quite a lot more than people think.’ As a teacher at the Yale

of cold, spent embitterment soon takes over.

School of Art he is sometimes disheartened by his students’ outlook: ‘Everybody thinks, ‘If I just get a show, I’m rich and famous’, especially now, because social

The work, ‘was intentionally heterogeneous’ he says. ‘I sort of stabbed this

media is so much of a driver, but it doesn’t work that way.’

way, and stabbed that way and often failed to strike anything, and it was a very frustrating experience but it was always driven by that over-arching concept, the

Teaching, in fact, seems to have dampened his faith in the art world. ‘If photography

fall…You have it in your mind, your radar is alert. It’s very hard to get beyond a

is in some way about the representation of reality, you don’t see it any more. The last

middle level: you can make an adequate image, but the ones that are special,

critique I was at, where four or five students present their work in front of a panel, there

those are the grace of god things, for which I say, thank you.’

Fred, 1986 Chromogenic color print 14 13/16 x 22 15/16” (37.7 x 58.2 cm)

Igor, 1987 Chromogenic color print 15 11/16 x 22 7/8” (39.8 x 58.1 cm)

Auden, 1988 Chromogenic color print 15 3/8 x 22 7/16” (39 x 57 cm)

Tim, 1990 Chromogenic color print 25 3/16 x 37 9/16” (64 x 95.5 cm)

Brent Booth; 21 years old Des Moines, Iowa; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 x 22 13/16” (38.2 x 58 cm)

Eddie Anderson; 21 years old Houston, Texas; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 23 5/8 x 35 7/8” (60 x 91.1 cm)

Marilyn; 28 Years Old Las Vegas, Nevada; $30; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 24 x 35 15/16” (61 x 91.4 cm)

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Q&A New York, 1994 Chromogenic color print 25 11/16 x 37 1/2” (65.2 x 95.3 cm)

Q: Your most recent project, East Eden, is a response to the banking crisis. Do you have a sense of apocalypse, now? It’s about the loss of innocence. People started out believing there are weapons of mass destruction, that they would never have to pay their mortgage back, that they could borrow against the house that they didn’t even own and buy another car, and the people that sold them these ideas knew all along that it was not true. It’s no different than the devil tempting Adam and Eve. It was a temptation and I believe that the consequence was that they were cast east of Eden. It’s a classic story and they suffered: they were meant to suffer as a result of it. I believe that the whole world suffered as a result of the economic crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And once again, the people who were most directly responsible for it didn’t take any responsibility; as the devil never does. It just seemed obvious. Q: With your street photography, how involved did you become with the ethics of your set-ups and of taking pictures of people unawares? Very few of those people ever got in touch with me. In a public place like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, there is no expectation of privacy. How many cameras are in Piccadilly? The idea that they were photographed without their knowledge doesn’t bother me at all. The issue in the case of the Hasidic man was that I sold the photograph and I made money from it. I have to say I wouldn’t particularly like that happening to me, just because I don’t like the idea of my face on somebody else’s wall. But I have to maintain my right to do it. Is that hypocritical: I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, but I maintain my right to do it? I don’t think it’s hypocritical. Q: Do you remember when you first picked up a camera? I think my father bought a camera for himself but he couldn’t figure out how to use it, so he gave it to me. I was in High School. It was a Pentax, 35mm. Q: With you series Hustlers, what made you think to choose male prostitutes as the subject matter for your first project? I had lived in Los Angeles. I was completely aware of what was going on because I had a gay friend who was always partaking of it, you might say. That was before the Aids crisis. When that happened and there was the government repression of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance. It also coincided with the death of my brother from Aids. I put a lot of things together and there was also a theoretical thing. Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you give them

something. I decided to monetise that. I didn’t pay anyone before that. But a lot of people thought that it was unethical to pay people. So I got a certain amount of grief from people, not because of the subject matter but because it’s almost a documentary realm, seeking out the other side of their lives. But I didn’t really seek it out: I never went home with them; I never really knew anything about them. The whole relationship started and ended in a couple of hours. There was money exchanged and that was, I think, within the photographic community, criticised. Q: Do you know what became of any of the subjects? Yeah, I heard a few things. No one became a senator. Usually you hear that they’ve died. Q: You’ve spoken about the Disneyfication of places like Times Square. Do you worry that the street culture is being lost in places like New York City and London? I don’t know if you could do what I did. The police would probably stop you. You are not allowed to photograph bridges or government buildings or anything that might be considered scouting for terrorism. People are very wary of that. The other thing is that these places have become tourist traps and you can hardly move. Q: With the advances in digital technology, do you think there is still space for a photographer to come along with high production values and expensive lighting? You can still do expensive lighting and high production values with a digital camera. It’s the ones that don’t use digital who are going to have a problem. Right now, I include myself among them. Everything has been eliminated. Polaroid doesn’t exist anymore, Kodak is bankrupt: they are all going under. One side aspect of digital is that you can operate in lighting conditions that you could never operate in before. People don’t need production value anymore. You can shoot a movie with a digital camera and never use a light.

Mario, 1978 Chromogenic color print 15 7/8 x 23” (40.4 x 58.5 cm)

Major Tom Kansas City, Kansas; $20; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 1/8 x 22 3/4” (38.4 x 57.8 cm)

New York City 1996 Chromogenic color print 15 1/2 x 22 3/4” (39.4 x 57.8 cm)

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

WORD LIST

1 mysterious 2 emotional 3 imaginative 4 fictional 5 truthful 6 fantasy 7 dreamlike 8 deep 9 choreographed 10 artifical 11 arranged 12 composed 13 constructed 14 narrated 15 shocking 16 controversial 17 depressing 18 interesting 19 sexual 20 political 21 captivating 22 gloomy 23 dynamic 24 lonely 25 realistic

26 dark 27 kitschy 28 secretive 29 urgent 30 contemplative 31 serious 32 obscene 33 arguable 34 somber 35 enigmatic 36 retro 37 real-life 38 city 39 masterful 40 busy 41 complex 42 confusing 43 heavy 44 academic 45 meaningful 46 beautiful 47 well-lit 48 explicit 49 free 50 banal

DEFINITIONS

narrative (n.): a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious. somber (adj.): oppressively solemn or sober in mood; grave. complex (adj.): so complicated or intricate as to be hard to understand or deal with controversial (adj.): prolonged public dispute, debate, or contention dynamic (adj.): pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action; vigorously active or forceful; energetic enigmatic (adj.): puzzling occurrence, situation, statement, person, etc.; perplexing; mysterious

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

QUOTES

“Though the photos look simple to take, in reality each scene has been well choreographed by diCorcia long before the shutter has been clicked.”

“Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks,” once commented diCorcia.

“The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it,” said diCorcia.

“They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi.

“Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you give them something. I decided to monetise that.” Philip-Lorca diCorcia

WORD COMBINATIONS

Enigmatic Narrative Contemplative Fiction Fictional Introspective Composed Complexity Ambiguous Truth Beautiful Mystery

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

ARTICLE TITLES

The Uncontrollable Possibilities: Philip-Lorca diCorcia Unraveling a Mystery: Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography is a Suggestion: Philip-Lorca diCorcia Ambiguous Truth: Philip-Lorca diCorcia Composed Complexity: Philip-Lorca diCorcia Enigmatic Narrative: Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PECHA KUCHA

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The theatricality of his images is carefully constructed: he

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer

DiCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut.

arranges the objects of each scene and devises precise

whose work encompasses both documentary and staged

He developed an interest in photography while he was

lighting and framing for every project. His work is often

photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative

attending the University of Hartford in the early 1970s. He

described as cinematic, but diCorcia insists that his pictures

mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography

later studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in

suggest rather than tell a full narrative, and viewers are

as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of

Boston, and he continued his education at Yale where he

encouraged to interpret the situation for themselves.

seemingly straightforward compositions.

graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979.

His earliest work, from the late 1970s, featured his friends

In 1989, the National Endowments for the Arts awarded

During the next two years, diCorcia used the grant money

and family in scenes that evoke loneliness, contemplation,

diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship of $45,000. This was

for his series, Hustlers. He photographed male prostitutes

or, occasionally, humor. In Mario, diCorcia’s brother stares

during the time of the AIDS crisis, and the NEA was under

he approached on Santa Monica Boulevard, paying them

into an open refrigerator, on a mission for a late-night snack.

attack for representing controversial nude photography and

whatever they typically charged for their services to instead

The photograph combines an impression of complete

explicit homosexuality. The NEA became cautious about

pose in motel rooms or parking lots, outside gas stations, or

stillness with the eerie, seemingly contradictory sense of

limiting work used with grant awards, and diCorcia had

simply lying on street corners.

witnessing a fleeting moment.

to sign a contact promising his photographs would not be obscene.

Each portrait is labeled with the man’s name, age, the city he

After working on the Hustlers series, diCorcia delved

For his series Streetwork (1993–97) and Heads (2000–01),

came from, and the amount of money he was paid for posing

further into street photography. His 1990s photographs

he took thousands of photographs, of which he selected

for the picture. This one is captioned Eddie Anderson; 21

taken in Los Angeles and New York freeze the ebb and flow

only a handful for inclusion. Unlike other practitioners of

Years Old; Houston, Texas; $20. diCorcia’s subjects are what

of a city sidewalk. By arranging flashes and stationing his

street photography, diCorcia never wanted his images to

give his images their narrative power. They are performers

camera at a precise location, he suspended slices of time

propagate a moral truth or instigate social change.

whose interior self can differ greatly from their projected

in images that have the quiet stillness of Baroque paintings.

selves.

Lastly, I want to end on a quote of diCorcia’s. He says, “There’s a reductiveness to photography, of course—in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It’s almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.”

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

GARRY WINOGRAND ARTICLE BY NAOMI BLUMBERG

KEY IMAGE

Garry Winogrand, (born January 14, 1928, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died March 19,

students to rely on instinct rather than science and methodical technique when

1984, Tijuana, Mexico), American street photographer known for his spontaneous

photographing, advice that had a significant impact on Winogrand’s approach

images of people in public engaged in everyday life, particularly of New Yorkers

to his craft. Along with other photographers of his generation, such as Lee

during the 1960s. His unusual camera angles, uncanny sense of timing, and ability

Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, and Diane Arbus, Winogrand worked tirelessly to

to capture bizarre and sometimes implausible configurations of people, places,

capture the theatre of the street.

and things made him one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He was extremely prolific, and though he died young, Winogrand created a vast

Winogrand’s aesthetic vision began to emerge in 1960, when he took to the

corpus of work that documented society across the United States over the

streets of New York City with his Leica camera and his bravado and began using a

course of three decades.

wide-angle lens to create lyrical photographs of the human condition. Taking cues from documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank—the latter

Supported by the G.I. Bill after spending two years in the army, Winogrand

of whom was getting attention for his grainy candid photos—Winogrand taught

attended City College of New York (1947–48) and then Columbia University,

himself how to tilt the camera with the wide-angle lens in such a way that allowed

where he studied painting (1948–51). He was introduced to photography by the

him to include elements that, given his close vantage point, would have otherwise

school newspaper’s photographer, George Zimbel, who showed him the 24-

been cut off by the frame. This practice also resulted in unusual compositions

hour darkroom. They formed the “Midnight to Dawn” club, its name reflecting

with a certain amount of distortion. Shooting many frames in quick succession,

their all-night work in the darkroom. Winogrand (along with Zimbel) also studied

Winogrand did not strive for the classical composition of traditional photography.

photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1949 on a scholarship at the New

The tilted-frame technique, as opposed to placing the horizon line parallel to

School for Social Research (now the New School). Brodovitch encouraged his

the frame, was Winogrand’s (successful) experiment and subsequently became

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Metropolitan Opera, New York, ca. 1951

common practice among street photographers. His style quickly acquired the name “snapshot aesthetic,” a term Winogrand rejected because it implied that his approach was casual and without focus. His photographs of people, primarily women, in public places and on the street— especially Fifth Avenue in New York City—were tinged with humour and satire.

Peace Demonstration, Central Park, New York City, 1970

That work culminated in the 1975 book Women Are Beautiful, which seemed misogynistic to many readers. In 1971 Winogrand began teaching, first at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (through 1972) and then at the University of Texas at Austin (1973–78), before moving to Los Angeles. Capturing such Los Angeles sites as Hollywood Boulevard, Venice Beach, the Los Angeles International Airport, and the Ivar Theater, a strip club, began to command his attention. From this period until his death, he photographed obsessively and did not edit even a fraction of the thousands of rolls of film that he shot. Winogrand produced a few discrete series in the 1970s, one of which was Public Relations. For that series, which Winogrand started shooting in 1969, he photographed high-profile events such as protests, press conferences, sports games, campaign rallies, and museum openings in order to capture what he called “the effect of the media on events”—in other words, the way people look and how they behave when they are participating in an event that will be reported in the media. The series became a book and an exhibition at MoMA guest-curated by fellow photographer and friend Tod Papageorge in 1977. Winogrand’s other big project of the 1970s was the cleverly titled Stock Photographs, documenting the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, an annual livestock exposition and rodeo, which became Winogrand’s final photo book, published in 1980. Winogrand died suddenly at age 56, six weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. He left a body of work that was in complete disarray, with about 35,000 prints, 6,600 rolls of film (2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and 4,100 processed but not reviewed), 45,000 colour transparencies, and about 22,000 contact sheets (nearly 800,000 images). Winogrand’s frenetic style captured the chaos of life with immediacy and energy and left an indelible mark on 20thcentury photography. His archive, most of which is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, continued to yield new unprinted work for decades after his death. The first major retrospective of Winogrand’s work in 25 years, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013, exhibited nearly 100 photos that the photographer himself had never seen.

New York, 1968

New York, 1950s

New York, 1969

Coney Island, New York, ca. 1952

Demonstration outside Madison Square Garden, New York, 1968

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

New York, 1968

Hard Hat Rally, New York, 1970

El Morocco, New York, 1955

New York, ca. 1960

New York, 1965

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

SUSAN SONTAG ON PHOTOGRAPHY A N E X C E R P T F R O M P L AT Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; S C AV E

KEY IMAGE

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit,

booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their

in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being

wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monu-

educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many

ments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport,

more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and

Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag

since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very

vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image.

insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up,

our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They

and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are

are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most

experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its

grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we

acquisitive mood.

can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs

into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like

light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an

power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract

object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.

the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of

In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into

Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societ-

joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill,

ies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning

or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of

it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present.

them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take doz-

What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are

ens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that

handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images

they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the sub-

do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures

ject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,

of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced,

subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture

blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the

reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the

usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought

world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photo-

and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to

graphs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen

invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on

the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the

walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alpha-

photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

betize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less agFor many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and

gressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes

usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not

of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of

immortality— photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid—and a wider

the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first

public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since

two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made

it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of

possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a

its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the

set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill

book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into

and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly

general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked

images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of

at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recom-

painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible

mended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph.

number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent in-

Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated

dustrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in pho-

meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more

tography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating

rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and

them into images.

the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive con-

to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

traption—the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed—seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems prov-

The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only in-

en when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera

ventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional pho-

record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous

tographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no

roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of mod-

clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few

ern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.

pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photogra-

In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes

phy came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the

for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort;

operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced

but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like

the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph—any photograph—seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

HERB LUBALIN

Herb Lubalin is highly regarded in the history of graphic

dimension. As a publication designer, he pushed beyond

arts. He has been recognized, awarded, written about, and

the boundaries that constrained existing magazines—both in

emulated for his work. In January of 1981 he accepted the

form and content. In fact, some said he had pushed beyond

62nd AIGA medal. Lubalin’s work revolves around the theory

the boundaries of “good taste,” though in retrospect that

of meaning and how meaning is communicated using visuals

work is more notable today for its graphic excellence than

from one mind to another.

for its purported prurience. Lubalin helped push back the boundaries of the impact and perception of design—from

Typography is something Lubalin said should not be applied

an ill-defined, narrowly recognized craft to a powerful

to his work. He said, “What I do is not really typography,

communication medium that could put big, important ideas

which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting

smack in the public eye.

characters down on a page. It’s designing with letters. Aaron Burns called it, ‘typographics,’ and since you’ve got to put a

And finally, he pushed back what were believed to be the

name on things to make them memorable, ‘typographics’ is

boundaries of design for entire generations of designers

as good a name for what I do as any.”

who were to follow. For such a quiet, gentle person to have accomplished so much is testimony indeed to the power of

Lubalin used a different method of typographics—words, letters, pieces of letters, additions to letters, connections and combinations, and manipulation of letters. The “typographic impresario of our time,” Dorfsman called him, a man who “profoundly influenced and changed our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language.” He has found a way to give the shape of letters a voice and character of meaning. For example, his font Avant Garde literally moves ahead. All his designs relate to the meaning behind the message. To him, letters are not just letters. They have complex relationships that evoke meaning. Lubalin’s contribution to design history is important in that his typographic innovations pushed the boundries of imagination. As an agency art director, he pushed beyond the established norm of copy-driven advertising and added a new

ideas in the hands of a master.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

ALEXEY BRODOVITCH

Alexey Brodovitch is most well-known for his art direction

sometimes calling their work “boring,” and at best calling it

of Harper’s Bazaar for over 20 years. He was a Russian-

“interesting.” He did not really formulate a theory of design,

born photographer, designer, and instructor who played

but his methods still seemed to help students discover their

a crucial role in introducing a radically simplified, modern

creative reserves.

graphic design style into the United States. He believed photography should be the core of modern magazine design

Even at the height of his powers, however, Brodovitch’s

and used an expressionistic photography style.

personal life remained linked to loss and disappointment. His family life was evidently unhappy. In addition, a series

His first assistant in New York was a very young Irving Penn.

of house fires in the 1950s destroyed not only his country

Leslie Gill, Richard Avedon and Hiro are among the other

retreat but also his paintings, archives and library. In the

photographers whose work Brodovitch nurtured during his

1960s after he left Harper’s Bazaar, he continued to teach

long career. So great was his impact on the editorial image

but did little design work. He died in 1971 in a small village

of Harper’s Bazaar that he achieved celebrity status; the

in southern France where he had spent the last three years

film Funny Face, for example, which starred Fred Astaire as

of his life.

a photographer much like Avedon, named its art-director character “Dovitch.”

Today Brodovitch’s legacy is remarkably rich. His layouts remain models of graphic intelligence and inspiration, even

Brodovitch came to the United States in 1930 and started a

if seldom imitated, and the artists, photographers and

department of advertising, later known as the Philidelphia

designers whose careers he influenced continue to shape

College of Art. He trained students in the fundamentals

graphic design in the image of his uncompromising ideals.

of European design while doing his own freelance work. In 1934 Brodovitch caught the eye of Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He was hired on as art director and a fashion and magazine design revolution had begun. He was art director from 1934-1958, and he used the work of famous European artists and photographers. By the 1950s he was designing magazines more simply and with more white space, which became a hallmark of his style. He taught throughout his career. focusing on illustration, graphic design, and photography. Brodovitch, however, had a reputation of being rigorous and harsh to his students,

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

GAIL ANDERSON

Gail Anderson, born in Bronx, New York, 1962, is known for

were ultimately well suited to Rolling Stone, where she

her design career with Rolling Stone magazine. From 1987º

designed what might best be called “theatrical typography.”

– 2002 she held many positions, starting as an associate and becoming senior art director. She worked with AIGA

Anderson was keen on paying attention to the details. “I’m

medalist and art director Fred Woodward, and she did her

all about the wood-type bits and pieces. I love making those

work in a cramped office filled with all kinds of scraps she

crunchy little objects into other things, like faces.” A fancy

used to devise letter forms, such as hot metal, wood types,

border and detailed extras are always part of her repertoire.

twigs, and bottle caps. After her career at Rolling Stone she

“I’d ask the designers I work with to put them on everything,

joined SpotCo, one of the largest entertainment design agencies

if I could,” Anderson says, “but I like being employed.”

in New York, where she is now creative director of design. She was among AIGA’s 2008 medalists to recognize her She has an extreme devotion to craft and is passionate about

accomplishments in Graphic Design. She serves on the

inspiring and teaching. She creates typography from old and

advisory board for the Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

new forms, and although she considers her style “retro,”

Anderson served as the Director-At-Large for the Type

her methods can be seen as contemporary. “Her significant

Directors Club from 2014 to 2016.

contribution to design,” says Drew Hodges, her former classmate and current employer as founder and president of SpotCo, “is a belief in the tradition of typography and a joy in using it in a contemporary vernacular.” Anderson developed her approach while studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York under Paula Scher. But growing up, she recalls, “I used to make little Jackson Five and Partridge Family magazines. I wondered who designed Spec, 16 and Tiger Beat in real life, and as I got older, I began to research what was then called ‘commercial art.’” Woodward and Anderson worked closely at Rolling Stone. “Music always set the tone, and he was into low lighting, so the design room felt sort of cozy,” Anderson recalls. “And he’d just howl with glee when we ‘got it’ and it was a winner. He could really get you jazzed about the process, even when it was difficult.” Anderson’s own typographic proclivities

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

DAVID CARSON

David Carson is the “father of grunge typography.” Grunge

Carson loved to experiment, and in his teachings he

Typography was an art movement popular in the 1990s, and

encouraged designers to trust their instincts and put

it’s a messy and chaotic style of design. It’s considered one

themselves into their work. What’s most interesting about

of the most widespread movements in recent design history.

Carson is that he’s had no formal training and was the eigthranked surfer in the world. He never studied graphic design

Carson developed his own unique style that is clearly

history, so he never was inspired by the establishment and

recognizible as his work at first glance, and he was one of

didn’t feel apart of it, and that’s why his work is so unique.

the most popular and influencial graphic designers of the 90s. However, he did not start off as a graphic designer. He

His work will always be imitated and admired, yet no one can

graduated with a degree in sociology and started teaching

match his work. Alexander Gelman said, “In the 80s graphic

while training to be a professional surfer. He started

design became very conformistic, a parody of itself. David

experimenting with graphic design in the 1980s. His passion

Carson, with no formal design education, doing everything

for surfing played a role in his design career, designing

wrong, was confronted by the design community who didn’t

for surfing, snowboarding, and skateboarding magazines,

want to accept him. But students embraced him because

websites, and ads.

there was great honesty in what he was doing.”

He is most well-known for his experimental design and art direction for Ray Gun magazine. Carson aimed his designs towards the audience, using deconstructive typography to relate to the contents of the magazine: music, pop culture, lifestyle, and advertising. Another example for a successful project in David Carson’s work is The Book of Probes. All in all, Carson uses unpublished photos from his earlier work and computer manipulated imagery in order to visually present 400 pages, each page containing one “probe” – Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms, quotes from his books, lectures, articles, etc. What makes this partnership so interesting and unique is that “this collaboration creates a reciprocal and complementary tension between McLuhan’s words and Carson’s images,” according to the editors of the book.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

TIBOR KALMAN

Tibor Kalman, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949 is known

real estate brochure had to be positioned in terms of how

as the “bad boy” of graphic design in the 1980s. He prided

it could benefit the low-income community. When Tibor

himself in his moral compass. He believed that award-winning

would pitch a design to a client, he would focus on how the

design was not separate from the entire corporate ethic and

end result would advance the client and do good for society,

argued that “many bad companies have great design.” When

as opposed to typeface or color.

the clothing company Esprit was awarded the 1986 AIGA Design Leadership Award, Tibor distributed leaflets during

Later, Tibor became editor-in-chief of Colors magazine,

the awards ceremony protesting the company’s exploitation

where he continued to reject fashion magazine cliches in

of Asian laborers.

favor of promoting sociopolitcal issues. He said Colors was “the first magazine for the global village aimed at an

Tibor was a social activist for graphic design as a means of

audience of flexible minds, young people between fourteen

achieving good design and social responsiblity. He defined

and twenty, or curious people of any age.”

good design as “unexpected and untried.” Design should add interest to everyday life. Also, graphic design is a form

In 1997, Tibor was diagnosed with cancer and had to

of mass communication, and Tibor believed it should be

undergo chemo and radiation therapy. Until his death in 199

used to increase public awareness about social issues.

he continued to teach, contribute articles to the New York Times that attacked many social issues. Tibor proved that

In 1979 he founded his own design firm named M&Co.

anyone can create good design, but it’s the masters like him

named after his wife and co-creator, Maira. Tibor used this

who can use design as a tool to change a collective concious.

to further his social mission. He urged his clients to use advertising to promote political or social messages. He often advocated for the homeless, and one Christmas he sent over 300 clients and colleauges a box filled with contents of a homeless shelter meal and offered them donations. Tibor has been criticized of using these charitable donations as a public relations ploy, but he is sincere in his motives, especially given that as a child he was a Hungarian immigrant fleeing Communists and was virtually homeless when he first came to America. Tibor loved good design, but in the end he only supported it if it had a message that led to action for the greater good. Everything had to have meaning and reasonance. Even a

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

NEVILLE BRODY

Neville Brody is a London born designer, typographer,

Neville Brody said about his work, “Britain has always been

and art director. He studied design at the London College

very conservative, but it was around the beginning of the

of Communication and Hornsey College of Art. He’s best

punk period. That provided, not so much an inspiration,

known for his work on The Face magazine, Arena magazine,

but a permission, to explore new thought. And that kind of

as well as designing record covers for Cabaret Voltaire, The

rebellious spirit is something that’s pervaded all my work

Bongos, and Depeche Mode. In 1994 he created Research

since then.” He believes London has become a multicultural

Studios and is a founding member of Fontworks. He is now

area full of different thoughts and ideas, and this has

the Head of the Communication Art and Design department

provided him with all kinds of creative inspiration. “It doesn’t

at the Royal College of Art, London.

matter if it fails,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if people don’t like it. The important thing is to keep experimenting.”

In 1976, Brody started a B.A. course in graphics at the London College of Printing. He was often criticized by his mentors because his work was too experimental and did not use the safe and tested design strategies of commercial art. Eventually, punk rock became a big influence for Brody, and he even almost got kicked out of school for putting the Queen’s head sideways on a postage stamp design. After college, Brody’s experimental style caught the eye of music record companies, and he started designing covers for the punk rock scene. Later, as art director for The Face magazine, he changed the strict magazine structure of British culture into a more expressionistic aesthetic. In 1991, Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft created the FUSE project. FUSE is an interactive magazine that challenged current ideas about typography and visual language. The magazine had various themes, ranging from religion to pornography. In 1990 he also founded the FontFont typeface library with Erik Spiekermann. Together they wanted to bend the rules, test typographic boundaries, and build a typeface library with styles that are contemporary, experimental, and radical.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

DESIGN PROCESS 40

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

STEP 1: TITLES

Unraveling a Mystery: Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Ambiguous Truth: Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Enigmatic Narrative: The Work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

STEP 2: FONTS

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Unraveling a Mystery

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Ambiguous Truth

ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia The work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia The work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia The work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia

ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Enigmatic Narrative Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

STEP 3: TYPOGRAPHIC SOLUTIONS

Unraveling A Mystery PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

AMBIGUOUS TRUTH Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBIÂGUOUS TRUTH

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Unraveling a Mystery Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBI GUOUS TRUTH photography by

philip-lorca dicorcia

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA &

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA & THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE 52

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIP- THE LOR ENIGMA CA TIC DI NARRA CORCIA TIVE 54

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY photography by philip-lorca dicorcia

Unraveling a Mystery PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia 62

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AM GU T

Phot

MBI UOUS TRUTH

tography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE THE WORK OF PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Upon viewing Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs, you may think if you had been there at that moment, you could have taken the same photo. His photographs are ordinary yet abduct the viewer’s imagination. Looking at one his images, we are encouraged to make up our own stories. Though the photos look simple to take, in reality each scene has been well choreographed by diCorcia long before the shutter has been clicked. “Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks,” once commented diCorcia. The Yale-educated photographer has a cinematic approach to photography. Just as a film director must focus his or her attention on a critical scene, diCorcia takes many Polaroid test shots before taking the final photograph. He is also well known for his use of mixing artificial and natural light in his images in a distinctive way. His photographs are not candids. 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 continued his education at Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979. He wrote his thesis on two styles of filmmaking, the unseen world vs. the closed world. After graduating from Yale, diCorcia continued making photographs but wasn’t sure how he would transform this hobby of his into a lucrative career so he hopped a jet to the land of La-La, Los Angeles, to see if he could find a job in the film industry. After giving up on that career path, he returned to New York City and found a job working as an assistant to professional photographers. As is the case with many assistants, he learned about the techniques used in commercial photography. By 1984, diCorcia was making his living as a freelance photographer, taking photos for Fortune, Esquire, and later some Condé Nast publications - every travel photographer’s dream. The National Endowments for the Arts awarded diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship in 1989. At the time, the NEA was under attack for representing the controversial nude photography of Robert Maplethorpe. Remember how in the midst of the AIDS crisis right wing Senator Jesse Helms accused Maplethorpe’s photos of explicit homosexuality as being obscene? Many photographers banded together in support of Maplethorpe’s artistic freedom and First Amendment right. The NEA became cautious about limiting the work toward which its grant awards money could be spent. Therefore, as part of the fellowship contract diCorcia had to sign on a dotted line promising that the work he produced during the fellowship would not be obscene. During the next two years, he traveled to Los Angeles repeatedly. With an assistant to help him with his time consuming set-up of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph. As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age, hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The

information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made him re-enact this moment repeatedly to capture a moment of dull reality. Taking a cinematic approach to photography, diCorcia can spend long tedious hours setting up for one shot that he has imagined in his head. Instead of striving to accumulate a large body of work, he focused his creative energy on printing around twelve or so masterpieces a year. Whether we see a bedroom still life like Bruce and Ronnie 1982 or Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, the viewer feels privy to secrets he doesn’t quite know yet. “The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it,” said diCorcia. What can we learn from studying diCorcia’s work? Well, by visualizing a portrait so well in advance and planning every detail, you must become aware of every nuance. Notice the kitschy props and background? For example, the token hermetically sealed plastic cups in the bare motel room, the chained television set tuned to an old Bill Cosby show, the optimistic gleam of the Del Taco sign. The items are important to diCorcia’s work. “They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi in “Contemporaries: Philip-Lorca diCorcia” published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

FONT STUDIES

Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Bureau Grot One Three Bodoni

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Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

ipsae.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Bureau Grot One Three Melior

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

ARTICLE TITLE This is a subhead

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magINTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

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In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Letter Gothic Std. ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

ARTICLE TITLE This is a subhead

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In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

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Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Letter Gothic Std. Sabon

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

ARTICLE TITLE This is a subhead

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Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Berthold Walbaum Neutra Text

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

ARTICLE TITLE This is a subhead

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Font studies: mix one Sans and one Serif family

Neutra Text Baskerville

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

ARTICLE TITLE This is a subhead

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In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que

ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam

In re et que etustest,

bero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga.

qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que

inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate periAssit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

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Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

INITIAL FEATURE SPREADS 82

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Title | November 2017 | 03

Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks. by Zoe Larson Upon viewing Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs, you may think if you had been there at that moment, you could have taken the same photo. His photographs are ordinary yet abduct the viewer’s imagination. Looking at one his images, we are encouraged to make up our own stories. Though the photos look simple to take, in reality each scene has been well choreographed by diCorcia long before the shutter has been clicked. “Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks,” once commented diCorcia. The Yaleeducated photographer has a cinematic approach to photography. Just as a film director must focus his or her attention on a critical scene, diCorcia takes many Polaroid test shots before taking the final photograph. He is also well known for his use of mixing artificial and natural light in his images in a distinctive way. His photographs are not candids. 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 continued his education at Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979. He wrote his thesis on two styles of filmmaking, the unseen world vs. the closed world. After graduating from Yale, diCorcia continued making photographs but wasn’t sure how he would transform this hobby of his into a lucrative career so he hopped a jet to the land of La-La, Los Angeles, to see if he could find a job in the film industry. After giving up on that career path, he returned to New York City and found a job working as an assistant to professional photographers. As is the case with many assistants, he learned about the techniques used in commercial photography. By 1984, diCorcia was making his living as a freelance photographer, taking photos for Fortune, Esquire, and later some Condé Nast publications - every travel photographer’s dream. The National Endowments for the Arts awarded

diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship in 1989. At the time, the NEA was under attack for representing the controversial nude photography of Robert Maplethorpe. Remember how in the midst of the AIDS crisis right wing Senator Jesse Helms accused Maplethorpe’s photos of explicit homosexuality as being obscene? Many photographers banded together in support of Maplethorpe’s artistic freedom and First Amendment right. The NEA became cautious about limiting the work toward which its grant awards money could be spent. Therefore, as part of the fellowship contract diCorcia had to sign on a dotted line promising that the work he produced during the fellowship would not be obscene. During the next two years, he traveled to Los Angeles repeatedly. With an assistant to help him with his time consuming set-up of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph. As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age, hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBI GUOUS TRUTH Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBI GUOUS TRUTH

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Title — November 2017 — 02 74

“Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.”

by Zoe Larson On the eve of his first major retrospective in England Philip-Lorca di Corcia seems more concerned than flattered. ‘Superstitiously, I think most artists’ careers end up down the tubes after a retrospective,’ he says. ‘They really point out to you what you’ve done, and some of that is not pleasant, because you can always find something wrong with it.’ It’s strange to hear such self-deprecation from a man who is consistently referred to as one of the leading lights of his generation, an accolade that seems to amuse and frustrate him in equal measure. The Connecticut-born photographer, 62, first came to prominence in 1993 with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hustlers was a stout-hearted foray into the twitchy tenor of the post-Reagan era. DiCorcia sought out male prostitutes on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, offering them the money they would earn from having sex if he could shoot their portrait. ‘At first I used motel rooms,’ he says, ‘because I had to set the shot up, and to do it behind a closed door was a lot easier. But there were always problems with the management, and eventually I felt motel rooms had become a kind of leitmotif in the whole thing – the mirrors, the bathroom, the bedspread – so I moved out on to the street.’

Magazine Process Book / — Fall 2017 Magazine Title — November 2017 03

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his largescale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions.

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

CRYPTIC FICTION the work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia article by Zoe Larson

On the eve of his first major retrospective in England Philip-Lorca di Corcia seems more concerned than flattered. ‘Superstitiously, I think most artists’ careers end up down the tubes after a retrospective,’ he says. ‘They really point out to you what you’ve done, and some of that is not pleasant, because you can always find something wrong with it.’ It’s strange to hear such self-deprecation from a man who is consistently referred to as one of the leading lights of his generation, an accolade that seems to amuse and frustrate him in equal measure. The Connecticut-born photographer, 62, first came to prominence in 1993 with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hustlers was a stout-hearted foray into the twitchy tenor of the postReagan era. DiCorcia sought out male prostitutes on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, offering them the money they would earn from having sex if he could shoot their portrait. ‘At first I used motel rooms,’ he says, ‘because I had to set the shot up, and to do it behind a closed door was a lot easier. But there were always problems with the management, and eventually I felt motel rooms had become a kind of leitmotif in the whole thing – the mirrors, the bathroom, the bedspread – so I moved out on to the street.’ He has admitted that some of the first subjects fleeced him out of more than double the going rate, and professes he found the transaction process awkward. ‘Most of them didn’t believe I only wanted to pay them for their picture, they were like, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Process Book / Fall Magazine TitleMagazine / November 2017 / 2017 03

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Magazine Title / November 2017 / 02 86

On the eve of his first major retrospective in England PhilipLorca di Corcia seem more concerned than flattered. ‘Superstitiously, I think most artists’ careers end up down the tubes after a retrospective,’ he says. ‘They really point out to you what you’ve done, and some of that is not pleasant, because you can always find something wrong with it.’ It’s strange to hear such self-deprecation from a man who is consistently referred to as one of the leading lights of his generation, an accolade that seems to amuse and frustrate him in equal measure. The Connecticut-born photographer, 62, first came to prominence in 1993 with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hustlers was a stouthearted foray into the twitchy tenor of the post-Reagan era. DiCorcia sought out male prostitutes on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, offering them the money they would earn from having sex if he could shoot their portrait. ‘At first I used motel rooms,’ he says, ‘because I had to set the shot up, and to do it behind a closed door was a lot easier. But there were always problems with the management, and eventually I felt motel rooms had become a kind of leitmotif in the whole thing – the mirrors, the bathroom, the bedspread –

so I moved out on to the street.’ He has admitted that some of the first subjects fleeced him out of more than double the going rate, and professes he found the transaction process awkward. ‘Most of them didn’t believe I only wanted to pay them for their picture, they were like, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” At least in part, the series was intended as a thorn in the side of the pervading bigotry surrounding Aids (his brother Max died of an Aidsrelated disease). DiCorcia is one of five children. He had a turbulent time growing up in the home that his architect father built for the family. ‘Most of the parents wouldn’t let their kids come to our house. You never knew what was going to happen there, but it was always weird.’ He adds, ‘My mother walked [out]. She was certified mentally unstable. Do I remember her leaving? She was such a disruptive part of mine and my whole family’s existence that I can’t say I particularly missed her, put it that way.’ He was kicked out of school at 17. ‘I was stealing people’s stuff and selling it. I’d give it to some junkie friend of mine who’d give me heroin… I was crazy. I finally gave them a fake note saying my absence from class was due to hepatitis – I had no idea that would have quarantined the school – they called my father, and that was the last straw.’ Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA &

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE 88

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA & THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE 90

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

03 / MAGAZINE TITLE / November 2017 92

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBI GUOUS TRUTH photography by

philip-lorca dicorcia

03 / MAGAZINE TITLE / November 2017

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

AMBI GUOUS TRU photography by

philip-lorca dicorcia

03 / MAGAZINE TITLE / November 2017

UTH

written by zoe larson

On the eve of his first major retrospective in England PhilipLorca di Corcia seem more concerned than flattered. ‘Superstitiously, I think most artists’ careers end up down the tubes after a retrospective,’ he says. ‘They really point out to you what you’ve done, and some of that is not pleasant, because you can always find something wrong with it.’ It’s strange to hear such self-deprecation from a man who is consistently referred to as one of the leading lights of his generation, an accolade that seems to amuse and frustrate him in equal measure. The Connecticut-born photographer, 62, first came to prominence in 1993 with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hustlers was a stout-hearted foray into the twitchy tenor of the post-Reagan era. DiCorcia sought out male prostitutes on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, offering them the money they would earn from having sex if he could shoot their portrait. ‘At first I used motel rooms,’ he says, ‘because I had to set the shot up, and to do it behind a closed door was a lot easier. But there were always problems with the management, and eventually I felt motel rooms had become a kind of leitmotif in the whole thing – the mirrors, the bathroom, the bedspread – so I moved out on to the street.’ He has admitted that some of the first subjects fleeced him out of more than double the going rate, and professes he found the transaction process awkward.‘Most of them didn’t believe I only wanted to pay them for their picture, they were like, “Is

there anything else I can do for you?” At least in part, the series was intended as a thorn in the side of the pervading bigotry surrounding Aids (his brother Max died of an Aids-related disease). DiCorcia is one of five children. He had a turbulent time growing up in the home that his architect father built for the family. ‘Most of the parents wouldn’t let their kids come to our house. You never knew what was going to happen there, but it was always weird.’ He adds, ‘My mother walked [out]. She was certified mentally unstable. Do I remember her leaving? She was such a disruptive part of mine and my whole family’s existence that I can’t say I particularly missed her, put it that way.’ He was kicked out of school at 17. ‘I was stealing people’s stuff and selling it. I’d give it to some junkie friend of mine who’d give me heroin… I was crazy. I finally gave them a fake note saying my absence from class was due to hepatitis – I had no idea that would have quarantined the school – they called my father, and that was the last straw.’ The following year he overdosed after experimenting with belladonna and had a psychotic reaction that led to a spell in a mental hospital. Of his two companions who took it with him, one died.‘It shook me in a way that put me on the path to sorting my life out,’ he says. He enrolled in art school in Boston where he started out making conceptual/performance pieces before settling on photography. His first works were a study of suspense: normal views of a room where an object is falling off the table or mantelpiece. Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

03 //

// Magazine Title //

// November 2017

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia // Article by Zoe Larson Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

UNRAVELING A MYSTERY Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Article by Zoe Larson

100

Magazine Title / November 2017 / 03

pon viewing Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs, you may think if you had been there at that moment, you could have taken the same photo. His photographs are ordinary yet abduct the viewer’s imagination. Looking at one his images, we are encouraged to make up our own stories. Though the photos look simple to take, in reality each scene has been well choreographed by diCorcia long before the shutter has been clicked. “Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks,” once commented diCorcia. The Yale-educated photographer has a cinematic approach to photography. Just as a film director must focus his or her attention on a critical scene, diCorcia takes many Polaroid test shots before taking the final photograph. He is also well known for his use of mixing artificial and natural light in his images in a distinctive way. His photographs are not candids. 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 continued his education at Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979. He wrote his thesis on two styles of filmmaking, the unseen world vs. the closed world. After graduating from Yale, diCorcia continued making photographs but wasn’t sure how he would transform this hobby of his into a lucrative career so he hopped a jet to the land of La-La, Los Angeles, to see if he could find a job in the film industry. After giving up on that career path, he returned to New York City and found a job working as an assistant to professional photographers. As is the case with many assistants, he learned about the techniques used in commercial photography. By 1984, diCorcia was making his living as a freelance photographer, taking photos for Fortune, Esquire, and later some Condé Nast publications - every travel photographer’s dream. The National Endowments for the Arts awarded diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship in 1989. At the time, the NEA was under attack for representing the controversial nude photography of Robert Maplethorpe. Remember how in the midst of the AIDS crisis right wing Senator Jesse Helms accused Maplethorpe’s photos of explicit homosexuality as being obscene? Many photographers banded together in support of Maplethorpe’s artistic freedom and First Amendment right.

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE 102

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia Article by Zoe Larson Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions.

Process Book / Fall Magazine Title / Magazine November 2017 / 2017 03

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia / Article by Zoe

104

e Larson Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

03 / MAGAZINE TITLE / November 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia article by Zoe Larson

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE P H OTO G R A P H Y BY P H I L I P - LO R C A D I C O R C I A W R I T T E N BY Z O E L A R S O N

MAGAZINE TITLE / NOVEMBER 2017 / 03

of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph. As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age, hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made him re-enact this moment repeatedly to capture a moment of dull reality. Taking a cinematic approach to photography, diCorcia can spend long tedious hours setting up for one shot that he has imagined in his head. Instead of striving to accumulate a large body of work, he focused his creative energy on printing around twelve or so masterpieces a year. Whether we see a bedroom still life like Bruce and Ronnie 1982 or Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, the viewer feels privy to secrets he doesn’t quite know yet. “The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it,” said diCorcia. What can we learn from studying diCorcia’s work? Well, by visualizing a portrait so well in advance and planning every detail, you must become aware of every nuance. Notice the kitschy props and background? For example, the token hermetically sealed plastic cups in the bare motel room, the chained television set tuned to an old Bill Cosby show, the optimistic gleam of the Del Taco sign. The items are important to diCorcia’s work. “They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi in “Contemporaries: Philip-Lorca diCorcia” published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Process Book / Fall 2017 Magazine

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Philip-Lorca diCorcia is an American photographer whose work encompasses both documentary and staged photography, lending his large-scale color prints a narrative mixture of truth and fiction. DiCorcia employs photography as a medium capable of creating complex realities out of seemingly straightforward compositions.

photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia article by Zoe Larson

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Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

FEATURE DESIGN DIRECTIONS 126

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia / Article by Zoe Larson

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After graduating from Yale, diCorcia continued making photographs but wasn’t sure how he would transform this hobby of his into a lucrative career so he hopped a jet to the land of La-La, Los Angeles, to see if he could find a job in the film industry. After giving up on that career path, he returned to New York City and found a job working as an assistant to professional photographers. As is the case with many assistants, he learned about the techniques used in commercial photography. By 1984, diCorcia was making his living as a freelance photographer, taking photos for Fortune, Esquire, and later some Condé Nast publications - every travel photographer’s dream. The National Endowments for the Arts awarded diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship in 1989. At the time, the NEA was under attack for representing the controversial nude photography of Robert Maplethorpe. Remember how in the midst of the AIDS crisis right wing Senator Jesse Helms accused Maplethorpe’s photos of explicit homosexuality

as being obscene? Many photographers banded together in support of Maplethorpe’s artistic freedom and First Amendment right. The NEA became cautious about limiting the work toward which its grant awards money could be spent. Therefore, as part of the fellowship contract diCorcia had to sign on a dotted line promising that the work he produced during the fellowship would not be obscene. During the next two years, he traveled to Los Angeles repeatedly. With an assistant to help him with his time consuming setup of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph. As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age,

Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.

The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture, the less happy I am with it.

Magazine Title | November 2017 | 07

hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made him re-enact this moment repeatedly to capture a moment of dull reality. Taking a cinematic approach to photography, diCorcia can spend long tedious hours setting up for one shot that he has imagined in his head. Instead of striving to accumulate a large body of work, he focused his creative energy on printing around twelve or so masterpieces a year.

Whether we see a bedroom still life like Bruce and Ronnie 1982 or Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, the viewer feels privy to secrets he doesn’t quite know yet. “The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it.” What can we learn from studying diCorcia’s work? Well, by visualizing a portrait so well in advance and planning every detail, you must become aware of every nuance. Notice the kitschy props and background? For example, the token hermetically sealed plastic cups in the bare motel room, the chained television set tuned to an old Bill Cosby show, the optimistic gleam of the Del Taco sign. The items are important to diCorcia’s work. “They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi in “Contemporaries: Philip-Lorca diCorcia” published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

with Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Q: Your most recent project, East Eden, is a response to the banking crisis. Do you have a sense of apocalypse, now?

Q: With your street photography, how involved did you become with the ethics of your set-ups and of taking pictures of people unawares?

A: It’s about the loss of innocence. People started out believing there are weapons of mass destruction, that they would never have to pay their mortgage back, that they could borrow against the house that they didn’t even own and buy another car, and the people that sold them these ideas knew all along that it was not true. It’s no different than the devil tempting Adam and Eve. It was a temptation and I believe that the consequence was that they were cast east of Eden. It’s a classic story and they suffered: they were meant to suffer as a result of it. I believe that the whole world suffered as a result of the economic crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And once again, the people who were most directly responsible for it didn’t take any responsibility; as the devil never does. It just seemed obvious.

A: Very few of those people ever got in touch with me. In a public place like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, there is no expectation of privacy. How many cameras are in Piccadilly? The idea that they were photographed without their knowledge doesn’t bother me at all. The issue in the case of the Hasidic man was that I sold the photograph and I made money from it. I have to say I wouldn’t particularly like that happening to me, just because I don’t like the idea of my face on somebody else’s wall. But I have to maintain my right to do it. Is that hypocritical: I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, but I maintain my right to do it? I don’t think it’s hypocritical.

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Q: Do you remember when you first picked up a camera? A: I think my father bought a camera for himself but he couldn’t figure out how to use it, so he gave it to me. I was in High School. It was a Pentax, 35mm. Q: With you series Hustlers, what made you think to choose male prostitutes as the subject matter for your first project? A: I had lived in Los Angeles. I was completely aware of what was going on because I had a gay friend who was always partaking of it, you might say. That was before the Aids crisis. When that happened and there was the government repression of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance. It also coincided with the death of my brother from Aids. I put a lot of things together and there was also a theoretical thing. Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you

give them something. I decided to monetise that. I didn’t pay anyone before that. But a lot of people thought that it was unethical to pay people. So I got a certain amount of grief from people, not because of the subject matter but because it’s almost a documentary realm, seeking out the other side of their lives. But I didn’t really seek it out: I never went home with them; I never really knew anything about them. The whole relationship started and ended in a couple of hours. There was money exchanged and that was, I think, within the photographic community, criticised. Q: Do you know what became of any of the subjects? A: Yeah, I heard a few things. No one became a senator. Usually you hear that they’ve died.

THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia / Article by Zoe Larson

04 / Magazine Title / November 2017

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Eddie Anderson; 21 years old Houston, Texas; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 23 5/8 x 35 7/8â&#x20AC;? (60 x 91.1 cm)

Marilyn; 28 Years Old Las Vegas, Nevada; $30 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 24 x 35 15/16â&#x20AC;? (61 x 91.4 cm)

06 / Magazine Title / November 2017

which its grant awards money could be spent. Therefore, as part of the fellowship contract diCorcia had to sign on a dotted line promising that the work he produced during the fellowship would not be obscene. During the next two years, he traveled to Los Angeles repeatedly. With an assistant to help him with his time consuming set-up of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph. As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age, hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made him re-enact this moment repeatedly to capture a moment of dull reality.

â&#x20AC;&#x153; Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.â&#x20AC;?

Mario, 1978 Chromogenic color print 15 7/8 x 23â&#x20AC;? (40.4 x 58.5 cm)

08 / Magazine Title / November 2017

Taking a cinematic approach to photography, diCorcia can spend long tedious hours setting up for one shot that he has imagined in his head. Instead of striving to accumulate a large body of work, he focused his creative energy on printing around twelve or so masterpieces a year. Whether we see a bedroom still life like Bruce and Ronnie 1982 or Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, the viewer feels privy to secrets he doesn’t quite know yet. “The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it,” said diCorcia. What can we learn from studying diCorcia’s work? Well, by visualizing a portrait so well in advance and planning every detail, you must become aware of every nuance. Notice the kitschy props and background? For example, the token hermetically sealed plastic cups in the bare motel room, the chained television set tuned to an old Bill Cosby show, the optimistic gleam of the Del Taco sign. The items are important to diCorcia’s work. “They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi in “Contemporaries: Philip-Lorca diCorcia” published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Brent Booth; 21 years old Des Moines, Iowa; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 x 22 13/16” (38.2 x 58 cm)

Bruce and Ronnie, 1982 Chromogenic color print 15 3/4 x 22 15/16” (40.1 x 58.4 cm)

Major Tom Kansas City, Kansas; $20 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 1/8 x 22 3/4” (38.4 x 57.8 cm)

Q &A

with Philip-Lorca diCorcia

November 2017 / Magazine Title / 11

government repression of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance. It also coincided with the death of my brother from Aids. I put a lot of things together and there was also a theoretical thing. Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you give them something. I decided to monetise that. I didn’t pay anyone before that. But a lot of people thought that it was unethical to pay people. So I got a certain amount of grief from people, not because of the subject matter but because it’s almost a documentary realm, seeking out the other side of their lives. But I didn’t really seek it out: I never went home with them; I never really knew anything about them. The whole relationship started and ended in a couple of hours. There was money exchanged and that was, I think, within the photographic community, criticised. Q: Do you know what became of any of the subjects? Yeah, I heard a few things. No one became a senator. Usually you hear that they’ve died. Q: You’ve spoken about the Disneyfication of places like Times Square. Do you worry that the street culture is being lost in places like New York City and London? I don’t know if you could do what I did. The police would probably stop you. You are not allowed to photograph bridges or government buildings or anything that might be considered scouting for terrorism. People are very wary of that. The other thing is that these places have become tourist traps and you can hardly move. Q: With the advances in digital technology, do you think there is still space for a photographer to come along with high production values and expensive lighting? You can still do expensive lighting and high production values with a digital camera. It’s the ones that don’t use digital who are going to have a problem. Right now, I include myself among them. Everything has been eliminated. Polaroid doesn’t exist anymore, Kodak is bankrupt: they are all going under. One side aspect of digital is that you can operate in lighting conditions that you could never operate in before. People don’t need production value anymore. You can shoot a movie with a digital camera and never use a light.

PHILIPLORCA DICORCIA & THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE

Brent Booth; 21 years old Des Moines, Iowa; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 x 22 13/16” (38.2 x 58 cm)

pon viewing Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs, you may think if you

had been there at that moment, you could have taken the same photo. His photographs are ordinary yet abduct the viewer’s imagination. Looking at one his images, we are encouraged to make up our own stories. Though the photos look simple to take, in reality each scene has been well choreographed by diCorcia long before the shutter has been clicked. “Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks,” once commented diCorcia. The Yale-educated photographer has a cinematic approach to photography. Just as a film director must focus his or her attention on a critical scene, diCorcia takes many Polaroid test shots before taking the final photograph. He is also well known for his use of mixing artificial and natural light in his images in a distinctive way. His photographs are not candids. 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 continued his education at Yale where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 1979. He wrote his thesis on two styles of filmmaking, the unseen world vs. the closed world. After graduating from Yale, diCorcia continued making photographs but wasn’t sure how he would transform this hobby of his into a lucrative career so he

“PHOTOGRAPHY IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE EVERYONE THINKS HE SPEAKS.”

Marilyn; 28 Years Old Las Vegas, Nevada; $30; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 24 x 35 15/16” (61 x 91.4 cm)

hopped a jet to the land of La-La, Los Angeles, to see if he could find a job in the film industry. After giving up on that career path, he returned to New York City and found a job working as an assistant to professional photographers. As is the case with many assistants, he learned about the techniques used in commercial photography. By 1984, diCorcia was making his living as a freelance photographer, taking photos for Fortune, Esquire, and later some Condé Nast publications every travel photographer’s dream. The National Endowments for the Arts awarded diCorcia with an artist’s fellowship in 1989. At the time, the NEA was under attack for representing the controversial nude photography of Robert Maplethorpe. Remember how in the midst of the AIDS crisis right wing Senator Jesse Helms accused Maplethorpe’s photos of explicit homosexuality as being obscene? Many photographers banded together in support of Maplethorpe’s artistic freedom and First Amendment right. The NEA became cautious about limiting the work toward which its grant awards money could be spent. Therefore, as part of the fellowship contract diCorcia had to sign on a dotted line promising that the work he produced during the fellowship would not be obscene. During the next two years, he traveled to Los Angeles repeatedly. With an assistant to help him with his time consuming set-up of each shot, he frequented a seedy section of Santa Monica Boulevard in search of interesting subjects to photograph.

Major Tom Kansas City, Kansas; $20; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 1/8 x 22 3/4” (38.4 x 57.8 cm)

Mario, 1978 Chromogenic color print 15 7/8 x 23â&#x20AC;? (40.4 x 58.5 cm)

As we can see from this selection from his Hollywood series, the people in the shadows of the Hollywood glitz are just as interesting as the ones decorating Universal Studios parking lot. The images from his series on Hollywood drifters are gloomy and bewitching. DiCorcia asked each model for his age, hometown, and modeling fee. No doubt, he was quite gleeful about paying his models who were drifters, prostitutes, and runaways with his NEA stash. The information in the caption reads like a quirky epitaph. In the late 1970s, diCorcia began to explore and discover his artistic style while taking photographs of his friends and family as in this photo of his brother Mario standing in front of the fridge, forlorn and disillusioned. No matter how many times we stare into the lonely eyes of a fridge at midnight, there never seems to be anything good to eat, Swiss cheese, Maraschino cherries, PAM, and Dole fruit juice. The scene looks improvised yet diCorcia has arranged the props with strategically placed electronic flashes inside the fridge. Mario was very patient as his brother made him re-enact this moment repeatedly to capture a moment of dull reality. Taking a cinematic approach to photography, diCorcia can spend long tedious hours setting up for one shot that he has imagined in his head. Instead of striving to accumulate a large body of work, he focused his creative energy on printing around twelve or so masterpieces a year.

“THE MORE SPECIFIC T H E I N T E R P R E T AT I O N SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE, THE LESS H A P P Y I A M W I T H I T. ”

Eddie Anderson; 21 years old Houston, Texas; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 23 5/8 x 35 7/8” (60 x 91.1 cm)

Bruce and Ronnie, 1982 Chromogenic color print 15 3/4 x 22 15/16” (40.1 x 58.4 cm)

Whether we see a bedroom still life like Bruce and Ronnie 1982 or Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, the viewer feels privy to secrets he doesn’t quite know yet. “The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture,” says diCorcia, “the less happy I am with it,” said diCorcia. What can we learn from studying diCorcia’s work? Well, by visualizing a portrait so well in advance and planning every detail, you must become aware of every nuance. Notice the kitschy props and background? For example, the token hermetically sealed plastic cups in the bare motel room, the chained television set tuned to an old Bill Cosby show, the optimistic gleam of the Del Taco sign. The items are important to diCorcia’s work. “They enclose the figure in a field of psychological force, lending diCorcia’s photographic frame a voyeuristic urgency, as if the unseen viewer, possessing secret knowledge, is in the process of unraveling a mystery,” wrote Peter Galassi in “Contemporaries: Philip-Lorca diCorcia” published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Q&A WITH PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

the photograph and I made money from it. I have to say I wouldn’t particularly like that happening to me, just because I don’t like the idea of my face on somebody else’s wall. But I have to maintain my right to do it. Is that hypocritical: I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, but I maintain my right to do it? I don’t think it’s hypocritical. Q: Do you remember when you first picked up a camera? I think my father bought a camera for himself but he couldn’t figure out how to use it, so he gave it to me. I was in High School. It was a Pentax, 35mm. Q: With you series Hustlers, what made you think to choose male prostitutes as the subject matter for your first project? I had lived in Los Angeles. I was completely aware of what was going on because I had a gay friend who was always partaking of it, you might say. That was before the Aids crisis. When that happened and there was the government repression of work by Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance. It also coincided with the death of my brother from Aids. I put a lot of things together and there was also a theoretical thing. Photography is an exchange: they give you something and you give them something. I decided to monetise that. I didn’t pay anyone before that. But a lot of people thought that it was unethical to pay people. So I got a certain amount of grief from people, not because of the subject matter but because it’s almost a documentary realm, seeking out the other side of their lives. But I didn’t really seek it out: I never went home with them; I never really knew anything about them. The whole relationship started and ended in a couple of hours. There was money exchanged and that was, I think, within the photographic community, criticised.

AMBI GUOUS TRUTH Photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia

“Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.”

by Zoe Larson In the early 1990s, the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia made five trips to Los Angeles to pick up male prostitutes in Hollywood. Cruising down a seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, where young men loitered suggestively by the curb, he would slow down in his rental car when he saw a likely prospect. Once the man approached, Mr. diCorcia would make a proposition. He offered to pay the going rate, but instead of sex, what he wanted was a photograph. Usually, the hustler agreed. They drove together to a setting that Mr. diCorcia and his assistant had chosen and prepared. There, the pictures were taken, the money was transferred, and the two sides went their separate ways. When the Museum of Modern Art exhibited 25 of the photographs in 1993 under the title “Strangers,” each was labeled with the name of the man who posed, his hometown, his age, and the amount of money that changed hands. (The photographer could vouch for only the sum, usually $20 to $30.) Mr. diCorcia, now 61, would have liked to call the show “Trade.” Gay slang for a male prostitute, “trade” is also a straightforward description of what was going on. “They give you something, you give them something,” he said in a recent interview. Two decades later, the series has become known as “Hustlers,”

Brent Booth; 21 years old Des Moines, Iowa; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 x 22 13/16” (38.2 x 58 cm)

and under that title a much fuller selection (about 80) of the pictures is about to be published in a book by Steidldangin and will be exhibited next month at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. Depicting real people in contrived situations, the pictures occupy an ambiguous territory between fact and fiction, a gray zone that has become a preferred terrain for artists extending the boundaries of documentary photography. In the hands of Cindy Sherman or Gregory Crewdson, the staged photograph is redolent of artifice. With Mr. diCorcia and his like-minded colleagues, pre-eminently Jeff Wall, the scene depicted is often unremarkable, even banal, and it is not clear to what extent it is staged. When Mr. diCorcia, then an unknown photographer, dropped off his portfolio at the Museum of Modern Art in 1983, the curators waged an informal bet over whether the photographs were staged. Even connoisseurs couldn’t be sure. During Mr. diCorcia’s days as an art student in the mid’70s, young photographers were excited about concepts, not techniques. The practice of staging a photograph, which had been swept away by modernism like so much Victorian brica-brac, was back. But unlike the 19th-century artists whose ambition was to create photographs that resembled paintings, the new Postmodernists were self-consciously raising all sorts of questions about the medium itself — which, in hindsight, wasn’t really so different from what their predecessors had done. Soon after earning his M.F.A. at Yale in 1979, Mr. diCorcia began taking pictures of people he knew, many of them his relatives, in everyday situations that he meticulously assembled. For a photograph of a man staring at an open refrigerator in a nighttime kitchen, for instance, he positioned an electronic flash inside the refrigerator to amplify the sickly glow. The eerie illumination enhances the mysteriousness of the picture. It’s a little amusing that a photographer who says he began

“They give you something, you give them something.”

Major Tom Kansas City, Kansas; $20; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 15 1/8 x 22 3/4” (38.4 x 57.8 cm) Eddie Anderson; 21 years old Houston, Texas; 1990-92 Chromogenic color print 23 5/8 x 35 7/8” (60 x 91.1 cm)

without any keen interest in the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the camera has become known as one of the contemporary masters of photographic lighting, creating pictures in which illumination is as baroquely theatrical and physically present as in a Caravaggio painting. In 1989, financed by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mr. diCorcia began his “Hustlers” project. He was stepping out into the world, away from his personal circle, to make the same kind of dramatic images. And while the subjects were now strangers, the procedure was almost as manageable as when he posed his relatives in Hartford. “It was a convenient way to do this work, because these guys were selling their time,” said Peter Galassi, a former chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized the “Hustlers” exhibition. “If you just tried to do this in Union Square, you’d have more trouble finding people willing.” In that period, some artists were declining grants from the endowment. A brouhaha that started with the 1987 photograph “Piss Christ,” made by Andres Serrano with endowment support, and which then expanded over an exhibition of sexually explicit Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, led Congress in 1989 to require endowment artist grants to take into consideration “general standards of decency.” Mr. diCorcia, who received $45,000, said he never considered returning the money, but he enjoyed knowing that he was using part of it to pay prostitutes. Including the sum in the title of each photograph was a discreet thumb in the eye of the decency standard, but it also highlighted a theme of the piece. “The guys commodified themselves, and commodities have prices,” Mr. diCorcia said. He used a 6-by-9 Linhof view camera, which he positioned in advance with Polaroid tests. At first, he photographed his subjects only in motel rooms. Later, he moved onto the streets. “I had to go out every day and figure out how to change it,” he recalled. “There’s no script.”

Tim, 1990 Chromogenic color print 25 3/16 x 37 9/16” (64 x 95.5 cm)

Bruce and Ronnie, 1982 Chromogenic color print 15 3/4 x 22 15/16â&#x20AC;? (40.1 x 58.4 cm) Mario, 1978 Chromogenic color print 15 7/8 x 23â&#x20AC;? (40.4 x 58.5 cm)

“There’s no script.”

One man is eyeing a burger on the other side of a diner window. Another is seated on the curb of a parking lot next to a smashed car. Mr. diCorcia told the men not to look at the camera, but otherwise offered little direction. “I don’t do motivational,” he said. “I don’t say, ‘Pretend the L.A.P.D. has got you up against the wall, and you’re trying to explain the vial of crack cocaine in your pocket.’” Most of the men are staring into the middle distance, displaying a bored detachment in the powdery mauve light of a Los Angeles dusk. Occasionally, something unplanned would happen: Once, a group of three women wandered into the frame. Or sometimes, when the man arrived at the set, Mr. diCorcia decided to change the prepared compositions. “Those tend to be the best ones,” he said. Portrait photography, unless it is commissioned by the subject in a studio, usually shows celebrities. However, two of the most important portrait photographers of the 20th century, August Sander and Diane Arbus, specialized, as Mr. diCorcia did, in people who were not famous. They spent hours (Arbus, in some instances, years) to establish a relationship that penetrated the subject’s defensive mask. In the “Hustlers” series, portraying the prostitute in full psychological armor was part of the project. The vacuous expressions on the faces create a feeling of rudderless, dispirited anomie that was emblematic of the larger society. Maintaining a distance is also the way Mr. diCorcia prefers to practice. “I don’t get up close and cuddly with my subjects,” he said. “I didn’t follow these people home. It’s not a documentary.” He argues that creating intimacy between photographer and subject doesn’t pay off anyway. “I think it’s all an illusion,” he said. “That there’s a perfect rapport established in the best work is false.”

In a process so impersonal, how much of his personality does Mr. diCorcia reveal? Tod Papageorge, who was his teacher and later his colleague in the Yale photography department, said that Mr. diCorcia’s work is heavily autobiographical. Mr. Papageorge points out, for example, that Mr. diCorcia’s gay brother died of AIDS a year before the “Hustlers” series began. Although Mr. diCorcia said he is uncertain whether his motivation can be traced to his brother’s death, he emphasized the anger that he and other politically disheartened artists experienced at the time. And as with many of the men on Santa Monica Boulevard who came from small towns dreaming of becoming movie stars, he had experienced his own disillusionment in Hollywood: Trying to make it as a cinematographer in the early ’80s, he gave up and returned to the East Coast. The stories of the young men in these photographs remain tantalizingly out of reach. “You learn a much more subtle lesson by what’s implied than by what’s stated,” Mr. diCorcia said. He reacts uneasily to the way Cindy Sherman “is flat out connecting,” he said. “As fine an artist as she is, there’s not a lot for you to intuit.” In his portraits of hustlers, each perplexing detail raises questions and conjures up alternate narratives. When he began his career, Mr. diCorcia thought he was investigating the ways in which a photograph deceives. Reviewing his early work, he looks at it differently now. “The first phase of Postmodernism was pointing out that there’s something wrong with what you think you know in the medium,” he said. “I’m bored with that. I think you can look at something, and there are things you do know.” That’s true of the “Hustlers” photographs. Simple, disquieting truths seep through their elaborate fictions.

caption caption Chromogenic color print 15 x 22 13/16” (38.2 x 58 cm)

COVERS 168

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

COVER INSPIRATION

What makes a good cover is its level of interest to the reader. A good cover is attention-grabbing and visually pleasing. I personally was drawn to the covers that formed a frame around the image, or a border. This way the text can overlap the image in an intersting way. If all the text is blocked in one area of white space it’s not as interesting. I was also drawn to the Gather cover’s thick rule that separates the title of the magazine. I used rules throughout my magazine design, so I wanted to incorporate that aspect in the cover. Type treatment is also important. In the Rumor magazine, I love how the “o” is extended and wraps around the subject of the image. This helped me realize that when building a cover, it’s important to consider a strong image and use the subject to define where text will be placed. In my final spreads, I used bits of images that bled into the next page, so in my cover I wanted to the same. In the end, my final cover had one dominant image bleeding off the right side of the front page, and text containing the contents of the magazine were overlapped like in the Monitor magazine. To keep the same layout style in my spreads, I included a black and white image on the back placed near the spine that bled onto the front cover. All these examples helped my design process in making a magazine cover. I realized the chosen image plays a crucial part in an interesting cover, as well as type treatment.

170

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172

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

I N S I G H T P H O T O G R A P H Y

A R T

VOL. 10 / FALL 2017

C U L T U R E

I N S I G H T A R T

C U L T U R E

VOL . 10 / FALL 2 017

Exclusive interview with photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia A look at the work and life of Garry Winogrand An excerpt of Susan Sontagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collection of essays, On Photography

M A G A Z I N E

I N S I G H T A R T

FALL 2 017 VOL. 10 IS SUE #5

C U L T U R E

M A G A Z I N E

PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA p. 0 6 GARRY WINOGRAND p. 2 0 SUSAN SONTAG p. 28

INSIGHT A RT & CU LTU RE MAG AZINE VOL . 1 0 / FA LL 2 017

I N S I G H T A R T

C U L T U R E

M A G A Z I N E

VOLUME 1 0 / FALL 2 017 THE ENIGMATIC NARRATIVE / GARRY WINOGRAND ARTICLE / SUSAN SONTAG ES SAY

I N S I G H T A R T

C U L T U R E

PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA p. 0 6 GARRY WINOGRAND p. 2 0 SUSAN SONTAG p. 28

M A G A Z I N E

FALL 2 017 VOL. 10 IS SUE #5

I N S I G H T

A R T & C U L T U R E

A R T

C U L T U R E

M A G A Z I N E

FALL 2 017 VOL. 10 IS SUE #5

PH ILIP-LORCA DICORCIA p. 0 6 GARRY WINOGRAND p. 2 0 SUSAN SONTAG p. 28

A R T

C U L T U R E

M A G A Z I N E

I N S I G H T FALL 2 017 VOL. 10 IS SUE #5

PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA p. 0 6 GARRY WINOGRAND p. 2 0 SUSAN SONTAG p. 28

I N S I G H T

A R T

C U L T U R E

M A G A Z I N E

I N S I G H T

HISTORICAL DESIGN DIRECTIONS 184

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

A DOCUMENTARY LIFE THE WORK OF GARRY WINOGRAND BY NAOMI BLUMBERG

Peace Demonstration, Central Park, New York City, 1970 New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s World Fair, 1964 New York, 1969 Coney Island, New York, ca. 1952 Metropolitan Opera, New York, ca. 1951

arry Winogrand, (born January 14, 1928, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died

students to rely on instinct rather than science and methodical technique when

March 19, 1984, Tijuana, Mexico), American street photographer known for his

photographing, advice that had a significant impact on Winogrand’s approach

spontaneous images of people in public engaged in everyday life, particularly

to his craft. Along with other photographers of his generation, such as Lee

of New Yorkers during the 1960s. His unusual camera angles, uncanny sense of

Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, and Diane Arbus, Winogrand worked tirelessly to

timing, and ability to capture bizarre and sometimes implausible configurations of

capture the theatre of the street.

people, places, and things made him one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He was extremely prolific, and though he died young, Winogrand

Early in his career Winogrand worked as a photojournalist for Pix, Inc., a photo

created a vast corpus of work that documented society across the United States

bureau that provided images to news and feature magazines. Starting in 1954,

over the course of three decades.

under the mentorship of agent Henrietta Brackman, Winogrand sold commercial photographs to magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Collier’s, Redbook, Life, and

Supported by the G.I. Bill after spending two years in the army, Winogrand

Look, popular publications then in their heyday. In 1955 Winogrand’s work was

attended City College of New York (1947–48) and then Columbia University,

included in the seminal exhibition The Family of Man, curated by photographer

where he studied painting (1948–51). He was introduced to photography by the

Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

school newspaper’s photographer, George Zimbel, who showed him the 24-

By the end of the 1950s, with television increasingly displacing magazines and

hour darkroom. They formed the “Midnight to Dawn” club, its name reflecting

photojournalists, Winogrand turned to making more personal work.

their all-night work in the darkroom. Winogrand (along with Zimbel) also studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1949 on a scholarship at the New

Winogrand’s aesthetic vision began to emerge in 1960, when he took to the

School for Social Research (now the New School). Brodovitch encouraged his

streets of New York City with his Leica camera and his bravado and began using a

Demonstration outside Madison Square Garden, New York, 1968 New York, 1965 New York, ca. 1960 El Morocco, New York, 1955

wide-angle lens to create lyrical photographs of the human condition. Taking cues from documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank—the latter of whom was getting attention for his grainy candid photos—Winogrand taught himself how to tilt the camera with the wide-angle lens in such a way that allowed him to include elements that, given his close vantage point, would have otherwise been cut off by the frame. This practice also resulted in unusual compositions with a certain amount of distortion. Shooting many frames in quick succession, Winogrand did not strive for the classical composition of traditional photography. The tilted-frame technique, as opposed to placing the horizon line parallel to the frame, was Winogrand’s (successful) experiment and subsequently became common practice among street photographers. His style quickly acquired the name “snapshot aesthetic,” a term Winogrand rejected because it implied that his approach was casual and without focus. His photographs of people, primarily women, in public places and on the street—especially Fifth Avenue in New York City—were tinged with humour and satire. That work culminated in the 1975 book Women Are Beautiful, which seemed misogynistic to many readers. Winogrand was included with Ken Heyman, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Minor White in the 1963 MoMA exhibition Five Unrelated Photographers. The following year he was granted a Guggenheim fellowship (his first of three), which allowed him to pursue his work without financial concern. He showed his photographs in a 1967 group exhibition at MoMA titled “New Documents”; the show included Arbus and Friedlander, photographers with whom he has been associated ever since. That, and all but one of his other exhibitions at MoMA, was curated by John Szarkowski, director of the MoMA’s photography department and Winogrand’s greatest champion. In

New York, 1950s Hard Hat Rally, New York, 1970 New York, 1968

“SHOOTING MANY FRAMES IN QUICK SUCCESSION, WINOGRAND DID NOT STRIVE FOR THE CLASSICAL COMPOSITION OF T R A D I T I O N A L P H O T O G R A P H Y. ”

addition to people, Winogrand photographed animals in Central Park Zoo and Coney Island’s New York Aquarium. He published some of those images in the book The Animals (1969)—which was a commercial failure—and exhibited them at MoMA in 1970. In 1971 Winogrand began teaching, first at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (through 1972) and then at the University of Texas at Austin (1973–78), before moving to Los Angeles. Capturing such Los Angeles sites as Hollywood Boulevard, Venice Beach, the Los Angeles International Airport, and the Ivar Theater, a strip club, began to command his attention. From this period until his death, he photographed obsessively and did not edit even a fraction of the thousands of rolls of film that he shot. Winogrand produced a few discrete series in the 1970s, one of which was Public Relations. For that series, which Winogrand started shooting in 1969, he photographed high-profile events such as protests, press conferences, sports games, campaign rallies, and museum openings in order to capture what he called “the effect of the media on events”—in other words, the way people look and how they behave when they are participating in an event that will be reported in the media. The series became a book and an exhibition at MoMA guest-curated by fellow photographer and friend Tod Papageorge in 1977. Winogrand’s other big project of the 1970s was the cleverly titled Stock Photographs, documenting the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, an annual livestock exposition and rodeo, which became Winogrand’s final photo book, published in 1980. Winogrand died suddenly at age 56, six weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. He left a body of work that was in complete disarray, with about 35,000 prints, 6,600 rolls of film (2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and 4,100 processed but not reviewed), 45,000 colour transparencies, and about 22,000 contact sheets (nearly 800,000 images). Winogrand’s frenetic style captured the chaos of life with immediacy and energy and left an indelible mark on 20thcentury photography. His archive, most of which is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, continued to yield new unprinted work for decades after his death. The first major retrospective of Winogrand’s work in 25 years, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013, exhibited nearly 100 photos that the photographer himself had never seen.

Garry Winogrand (1928 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1984), a New Yorker who roamed the United States during the postwar decades, left

behind

sweeping

portrait

of American life. His photographs powerfully combine the hope and exhilaration as well as the anxiety and turbulence that characterized America during these vital years, revealing a country that glitters with possibility but threatens to spin out of control.

THE WORK OF GARRY WINOGRAND

UNCANNY FAMILIARITY BY NAOMI BLUMBERG

arry Winogrand, (born January 14, 1928, Bronx, New

street photographer known for his spontaneous images of people in public engaged in everyday life, particularly of New Yorkers during the 1960s. His unusual camera angles, uncanny sense of timing, and ability to capture bizarre and sometimes implausible configurations of people, places, and things made him one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He was extremely prolific, and though he died young, Winogrand created a vast corpus of work that documented society across the United States over the course of three decades.

the army, Winogrand attended City College of New York (1947–48) and then Columbia University, where he studied painting (1948–51). He was introduced to photography by the school newspaper’s photographer, George Zimbel, who showed him the 24-hour darkroom. They formed the “Midnight to Dawn” club, its name reflecting their all-night work in the darkroom. Winogrand (along with Zimbel) also studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1949 on a scholarship at the New School for Social Research (now the New School). Brodovitch encouraged his students to rely on instinct rather than science and methodical technique when photographing, advice that had a significant impact

Peace Demonstration, Central Park, New York City, 1970

Supported by the G.I. Bill after spending two years in

Metropolitan Opera, New York, ca. 1951

New York’s World Fair, 1964 New York, 1969

York, U.S.—died March 19, 1984, Tijuana, Mexico), American

Coney Island, New York, ca. 1952

on Winogrand’s approach to his craft. Along with other photographers of his generation, such as Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, and Diane Arbus, Winogrand worked tirelessly to capture the theatre of the street. Early in his career Winogrand worked as a photojournalist for Pix, Inc., a photo bureau that provided images to news and feature magazines. Starting in 1954, under the mentorship of agent Henrietta Brackman, Winogrand sold commercial photographs to magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Collier’s, Redbook, Life, and Look, popular publications then in their heyday. In 1955 Winogrand’s work was included in the seminal exhibition The Family of Man, curated by photographer Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. By the end of the 1950s, with television increasingly displacing magazines and photojournalists, Winogrand turned to making more personal work. Winogrand’s aesthetic vision began to emerge in 1960, when he took to the streets of New York City with his Leica camera and his bravado and began using a wide-angle lens to create lyrical photographs of the human condition. Taking Robert Frank—the latter of whom was getting attention for to tilt the camera with the wide-angle lens in such a way that allowed him to include elements that, given his close vantage point, would have otherwise been cut off by the frame. This practice also resulted in unusual compositions

New York, 1965

his grainy candid photos—Winogrand taught himself how

with a certain amount of distortion. Shooting many frames in quick succession, Winogrand did not strive for the classical composition of traditional photography. The tilted-frame technique, as opposed to placing the horizon line parallel to the frame, was Winogrand’s (successful) experiment and subsequently became common practice among street photographers. His style quickly acquired the name “snapshot aesthetic,” a term Winogrand rejected because it implied that his approach was casual and without focus. His photographs of people, primarily women, in public places and on the street—especially Fifth Avenue in New York City—were tinged with humour and satire. That work culminated in the 1975 book Women Are Beautiful, which seemed misogynistic to many readers. Winogrand was included with Ken Heyman, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Minor White in the 1963 MoMA exhibition Five Unrelated Photographers. The following year he was granted a Guggenheim fellowship (his first of three), which allowed him to pursue his work without financial concern. He showed his photographs in a 1967 group exhibition at and Friedlander, photographers with whom he has been associated ever since. That, and all but one of his other exhibitions at MoMA, was curated by John Szarkowski, director of the MoMA’s photography department and

New York, ca. 1960

MoMA titled “New Documents”; the show included Arbus

El Morocco, New York, 1955

cues from documentary photographers Walker Evans and

P H O T O G R A P H Y. ”

COMPOSITION OF TRADITIONAL

NOT STRIVE FOR THE CLASSICAL

SUCCESSION, WINOGRAND DID

“SHOOTING MANY FRAMES IN QUICK

commercial failure—and exhibited them at MoMA in 1970. In 1971 Winogrand began teaching, first at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (through 1972) and then at the University of Texas at Austin (1973–78), before moving to Los Angeles. Capturing such Los Angeles sites as Hollywood Boulevard, Venice Beach, the Los

New York, 1968

those images in the book The Animals (1969)—which was a

O F R O L L S O F F I L M T H AT H E S H O T. ”

Coney Island’s New York Aquarium. He published some of

EDIT EVEN A FRACTION OF THE THOUSANDS

Winogrand photographed animals in Central Park Zoo and

P H O T O G R A P H E D O B S E S S I V E LY A N D D I D N O T

“ F R O M T H I S P E R I O D U N T I L H I S D E AT H , H E

Winogrand’s greatest champion. In addition to people,

Angeles International Airport, and the Ivar Theater, a strip club, began to command his attention. From this period until his death, he photographed obsessively and did not edit even a fraction of the thousands of rolls of film that he shot. Winogrand produced a few discrete series in the 1970s, one of which was Public Relations. For that series, which Winogrand started shooting in 1969, he photographed highprofile events such as protests, press conferences, sports games, campaign rallies, and museum openings in order to capture what he called “the effect of the media on events”— in other words, the way people look and how they behave when they are participating in an event that will be reported in the media. The series became a book and an exhibition at MoMA guest-curated by fellow photographer and friend Tod Papageorge in 1977. Winogrand’s other big project of the 1970s was the cleverly titled Stock Photographs, documenting the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, an annual livestock exposition and rodeo, which became Winogrand’s final photo book, published in 1980. Winogrand died suddenly at age 56, six weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. He left a body of work that was in complete disarray, with about 35,000 prints, 6,600 rolls of film (2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and 4,100 processed but not reviewed), 45,000 colour transparencies, and about 22,000 contact sheets (nearly 800,000 images). Winogrand’s frenetic style captured the chaos of life with century photography. His archive, most of which is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University decades after his death. The first major retrospective of Winogrand’s work in 25 years, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013, exhibited nearly 100 photos that the photographer himself had never seen.

New York, 1950s

of Arizona, continued to yield new unprinted work for

Hard Hat Rally, New York, 1970

immediacy and energy and left an indelible mark on 20th-

Demonstration outside Madison Square Garden, New York, 1968

A DO

CUM EN TA RY L IF E THE WORK OF GARRY WINOGRAND BY NAOMI BLUMBERG

Garry Winogrand (1928 – 1984), a New Yorker who roamed the United States during the postwar decades, left behind a sweeping portrait of American life. His photographs powerfully combine the hope and exhilaration as well as the anxiety and turbulence that characterized America during these vital years, revealing a country that glitters with possibility but threatens to spin out of control.

arry Winogrand, (born January 14, 1928, Bronx, New York, U.S.—

died March 19, 1984, Tijuana, Mexico), American street photographer

known for his spontaneous images of people in public engaged in everyday life, particularly of New Yorkers during the 1960s. His unusual

camera angles, uncanny sense of timing, and ability to capture bizarre and sometimes implausible configurations of people, places, and things

made him one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He was extremely prolific, and though he died young, Winogrand created

a vast corpus of work that documented society across the United States over the course of three decades.

Supported by the G.I. Bill after spending two years in the army, Winogrand attended City College of New York (1947–48) and then Columbia

University, where he studied painting (1948–51). He was introduced to

photography by the school newspaper’s photographer, George Zimbel, who showed him the 24-hour darkroom. They formed the “Midnight

to Dawn” club, its name reflecting their all-night work in the darkroom. Winogrand (along with Zimbel) also studied photography with Alexey

“SHOOTING MANY FRAMES IN QUICK SUCCESSION, WINOGRAND DID NOT STRIVE FOR THE CLASSICAL C O M P O S I T I O N O F T R A D I T I O N A L P H O T O G R A P H Y. ”

El Morocco, New York, 1955

New York, 1969

Coney Island, New York, ca. 1952

on a scholarship at the New School for Social Research (now the New

Winogrand’s aesthetic vision began to emerge in 1960, when he took to

than science and methodical technique when photographing, advice

began using a wide-angle lens to create lyrical photographs of the human

School). Brodovitch encouraged his students to rely on instinct rather

that had a significant impact on Winogrand’s approach to his craft. Along with other photographers of his generation, such as Lee Friedlander, Joel

Meyerowitz, and Diane Arbus, Winogrand worked tirelessly to capture the theatre of the street.

Early in his career Winogrand worked as a photojournalist for Pix, Inc.,

a photo bureau that provided images to news and feature magazines. Starting in 1954, under the mentorship of agent Henrietta Brackman, Winogrand sold commercial photographs to magazines such as Sports

Illustrated, Collier’s, Redbook, Life, and Look, popular publications then in their heyday. In 1955 Winogrand’s work was included in the seminal exhibition The Family of Man, curated by photographer Edward Steichen

at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. By the end

of the 1950s, with television increasingly displacing magazines and photojournalists, Winogrand turned to making more personal work.

the streets of New York City with his Leica camera and his bravado and condition. Taking cues from documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank—the latter of whom was getting attention for his grainy

candid photos—Winogrand taught himself how to tilt the camera with

the wide-angle lens in such a way that allowed him to include elements that, given his close vantage point, would have otherwise been cut off

by the frame. This practice also resulted in unusual compositions with a

certain amount of distortion. Shooting many frames in quick succession, Winogrand did not strive for the classical composition of traditional photography. The tilted-frame technique, as opposed to placing the horizon line parallel to the frame, was Winogrand’s (successful)

experiment and subsequently became common practice among street

photographers. His style quickly acquired the name “snapshot aesthetic,” a term Winogrand rejected because it implied that his approach was casual and without focus.

New York, 1968

His photographs of people, primarily women, in public places and on the

In 1971 Winogrand began teaching, first at the Illinois Institute of

and satire. That work culminated in the 1975 book Women Are Beautiful,

of Texas at Austin (1973–78), before moving to Los Angeles. Capturing

street—especially Fifth Avenue in New York City—were tinged with humour

which seemed misogynistic to many readers. Winogrand was included with Ken Heyman, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Minor White in

the 1963 MoMA exhibition Five Unrelated Photographers. The following

year he was granted a Guggenheim fellowship (his first of three), which

allowed him to pursue his work without financial concern. He showed his photographs in a 1967 group exhibition at MoMA titled “New

Documents”; the show included Arbus and Friedlander, photographers with whom he has been associated ever since. That, and all but one of

his other exhibitions at MoMA, was curated by John Szarkowski, director of the MoMA’s photography department and Winogrand’s greatest

champion. In addition to people, Winogrand photographed animals in Central Park Zoo and Coney Island’s New York Aquarium. He published

some of those images in the book The Animals (1969)—which was a commercial failure—and exhibited them at MoMA in 1970.

Technology’s Institute of Design (through 1972) and then at the University

such Los Angeles sites as Hollywood Boulevard, Venice Beach, the Los Angeles International Airport, and the Ivar Theater, a strip club, began to command his attention. From this period until his death, he photographed obsessively and did not edit even a fraction of the thousands of rolls of

film that he shot. Winogrand produced a few discrete series in the 1970s, one of which was Public Relations. For that series, which Winogrand

started shooting in 1969, he photographed high-profile events such as protests, press conferences, sports games, campaign rallies, and museum openings in order to capture what he called “the effect of the media on

events”—in other words, the way people look and how they behave when

they are participating in an event that will be reported in the media. The series became a book and an exhibition at MoMA guest-curated by

fellow photographer and friend Tod Papageorge in 1977. Winogrand’s

other big project of the 1970s was the cleverly titled Stock Photographs, documenting the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, an annual

New York, 1965

Demonstration outside Madison Square Garden, New York, 1968

Metropolitan Opera, New York, ca. 1951

New York, 1968

livestock exposition and rodeo, which became Winogrand’s final photo book, published in 1980.

Winogrand died suddenly at age 56, six weeks after he was diagnosed

with cancer. He left a body of work that was in complete disarray, with

about 35,000 prints, 6,600 rolls of film (2,500 rolls of exposed but

undeveloped film and 4,100 processed but not reviewed), 45,000 colour

transparencies, and about 22,000 contact sheets (nearly 800,000 images). Winogrand’s frenetic style captured the chaos of life with immediacy and energy and left an indelible mark on 20th-century photography. His

archive, most of which is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, continued to yield new unprinted work for decades after his death. The first major retrospective of Winogrand’s work in 25 years, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in

2013, exhibited nearly 100 photos that the photographer himself had never seen.

Hard Hat Rally, New York, 1970

“ F R O M T H I S P E R I O D U N T I L H I S D E AT H , H E P H O T O G R A P H E D O B S E S S I V E LY A N D D I D N O T E D I T E V E N A F R AC T I O N O F T H E T H O U S A N D S O F R O L L S O F F I L M T H AT H E S H O T. ”

New York, ca. 1962

New York, ca. 1960

ESSAY DESIGN DIRECTIONS 210

Magazine Process Book / Fall 2017

O N P H OTO G R A A N E X C E R P T O F P L AT O’ S C AV E BY SUSAN SONTAG

umankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still

reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to

PH Y contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects

“ To c o l l e c t p h o t o g r a p h s i s to collect the world.”

that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It

thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality --

means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world

photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and

that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A

a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the

now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people

image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed,

to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to

smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential

have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psy-

quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does.

chic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies.

Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for put-

But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the

ting groups of photographs into general circulation. The se-

world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic

quence in which the photographs are to be looked at is pro-

images, which now provide most of the knowledge people

posed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to

have about the look of the past and the reach of the pres-

the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to

ent. What is written about a person or an event is frankly

be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais

an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like

quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated med-

paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem

itation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a

to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it,

subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging)

miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, them-

in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs

selves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doc-

transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they

tored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of pa-

still are when served up in books.

per objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about,

package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck

but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph

in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, pro-

of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incrimi-

jected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them;

nates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the mur-

cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers

derous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs

compile them.

became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In

For many decades the book has been the most influential

another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A

way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs,

photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given

thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photog-

a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is

raphy) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue

like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through

of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort,

amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individ-

and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use

ual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems

of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, pho-

to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, re-

tography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeed-

lation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtu-

ing decades, during which technology made possible an

osi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand,

ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the

composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after

world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early

decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,”

masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron

just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a

who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images,

handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a

the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from

Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting

While a painting or a prose description can never be other

never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrializa-

than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can

tion of camera technology only carried out a promise inher-

be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But de-

ent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize

spite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs

all experiences by translating them into images.

authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady com-

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome

merce between art and truth. Even when photographers are

and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the

most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted

wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the

by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely

era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pic-

gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photo-

tures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the

graphic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans,

early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them.

Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens

Since there were then no professional photographers, there

of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects un-

could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had

til satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film

no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic

-- the precise expression on the subject’s face that support-

activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was

ed their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,

only with its industrialization that photography came into

exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should

its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for

look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers

the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against

are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although

these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photogra-

there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture

phy-as-art.

reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.â&#x20AC;?

ON PHOTOG A N E X C E R P T O F P L AT Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; S C AV E BY SUSAN SONTAG

umankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images

of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first

RAPHY

fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris

“ To c o l l e c t p h o t o g r a p h s i s t o c o l l e c t t h e w o r l d . ”

Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had

“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”

gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

O N P H OTO G R A P H Y A N E X C E R P T O F P L AT O’ S C AV E BY SUSAN SONTAG

umankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old

habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of

“ To c o l l e c t p h o t o g r a p h s i s to collect the world.”

booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced,

meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more

blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the

rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and

usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought

the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in

and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to

visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease

invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on

to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and

record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous

usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not

roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of mod-

immortality—photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid—and a wider