dc.description.abstract | American artist Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s images always give one the impression that there seems to be many layers of meanings or ambiguous narratives in them. He described scenes of everyday life with saturated colors and clear details, drew material from people’s domestic life at the end of 1980s, then at the beginning of the 1990s, he went outdoors to capture the city scenes and strangers on the street. Crossing the border between art photography and commercial photography, diCorcia is frequently engaged in family snapshot, portraiture and street photography. But the boundaries between these genres sometimes are not entirely definite through his hybrid composition. I uses the term, ‘staged photography,’ as the topic of this thesis to characterize the series “Hollywood” (1990-1992), “Streetwork” (1993-1999), and “Heads” (1999-2001) which differ from straight photography and are practiced with manipulation and staging. Despite diCocia created them with varying degrees of mediation, he implemented the individualized use of artificial light source all the way through, either by directional mode and cinematic preconception or by taking snapshots of citiscapes, are produced the effect of dramatic studio portraits. Thus the images span the gap between the naturalistic decisive moment and manneristic fashion photography, and attempt to shake the spectator’s habitus of looking. Therefore, the thesis aims to discuss the vision created by ambiguous visual rhetoric and hybrid imageries of different genres. In my opinion, such a vision is ‘the illuminated field’ that diCorcia interweaves visibility and discursivity. He crossed the multiple domains to quote the mediality of film, to demonstrate grammars of commercial photography and to alter the tradition of street photography, creating the appearance of the familiar yet uncanny daily life. This suggested that the artist utilizes the schism between the reality and the text to express his concern about the conditions of contemporary American society and culture. The majority of art criticism and reports on diCorcia can be found in art periodicals, photography and fashion magazines, and the scholarly essays are scattered in the catalogues of exhibitions. The literature mainly focuses on how diCorcia revisited the tradition of street snapshots, translated its established convention, and on his skills of using flash devices and symbolism of light. All this literature is an important basis for me to understand the characteristics of diCorcia’s oeuvre but it also inspires me to probe into those unexplored problems.
In the first chapter, I trace diCorcia’s background and the formation of his style, summarize the chronological course of his creation, and highlight the core motifs and foundational ideas of diCorcia’s works by an analysis of his interviews. In the second chapter, based on the series of tableau photography “Hollywood,” I deeply explore how its strong cinematic look created by lighting, articulates the star system in the film industry and discuss how the mass media shapes the figure of male homosexual. In the third chapter, I point out that with the series “Streetwork,” diCorcia varies the canon of street photography from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Garry Winogrand, and brings about a “double consciousness”, which allows the viewer to understand the scene as inauthentic yet at the same time to accept it as fundamentally real nevertheless. In this way, the path of understanding the space of the image itself is directed to Edward Soja’s epistemology of ‘Thirdspace’. In the fourth chapter, I discuss the series “Heads” photographed at the Times Square in New York. diCorcia followed the lineage of surreptitious photography, exemplified by Walker Evans’s subway photographs. With the radical use of the strobe light, diCorcia created a strong chiaroscuro effect which may serve as a metaphor of the scopic surveillance lurking everywhere in America’s big cities. In the dark box, the nervy American collective seem to be in prison and discipline themselves.
| en_US |