Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

Gagosian Gallery, London
Through June 12

The slogan for the UK’s National Lottery franchise is “It Could Be You,” a sentiment that could just as easily be applied to Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s recent photographs. Where once he paid male prostitutes to pose for him, DiCorcia has lately taken to singling out individuals from the crowds in New York’s Times Square and, using a trip light hidden nearby, capturing their illuminated faces while fading everything around them into darkness. The eight works displayed from the series “Heads” throw into sharp relief our tendency to read character through physiognomy.

Without compunction, we slip into imagining what logistical troubles are animating the features of the bullnecked Head #9 (Mailman); we arbitrarily class the pockmarked, concert-flyer toting, world-weary blonde woman of Head #2 (Poland Spring) as a single mother; and we imagine that the heavy-lidded, ancient looking Chinese man of Head #6 (Security Guard) hasn’t left his post in 20 years. Immortalized in heavy chiaroscuro, the figures seem caught in a moment of grace, their transient concerns made permanent.

After viewing a few of these works, one wonders whether every face isn’t equally interesting if one chooses to invest one’s imagination in it. But think about the last time you perused someone else’s family album; it’s a credit to DiCorcia’s selection process that “Heads” prompts the question at all.

In DiCorcia’s earlier “Streetworks” series, groups of individuals are seen in daylight, but, thanks to hidden flashbulbs, a single one is bathed in a benign glow. In Naples (1995), the lit figure—a swarthy, middle-aged man—shuffles forward with priestly mien; in London (1995), a black man in tweed cap and jacket poses in the street, gazing into the lens, his head lolling like a crucified Christ.

But despite their theatricality, these photographs still depend on one’s interest in the lives and thoughts of strangers, and, at a certain point in the exhibition, this curiosity becomes saturated and reverses itself. No matter how adroitly composed DiCorcia’s images are, they still leave us in a vacuum of unknowing and, over time, expose the viewer’s relative capacities for misanthropy and charity.




Martin Herbert