Friday, August 31, 2012

Photographic Storytelling

W Magazine (Bride), 2003

Sergio & Toti, 1985

Mike Miller, 24 years old, Allentown, Pennsylvania, $25, 1990-92

Tim, 1990

Untitled (Polaroid), no date

W Magazine (Isabelle Huppert), 2004

W Magazine, 2000

New Haven, 1978

Los Angeles, 1993

Coney Island, 1994

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951) recently published Eleven : W stories 1997-2008When my daughter was in middle school (as the Eighties turned into the Nineties) I got her a subscription to W Magazine (the updated incarnation of Women's Wear Daily and the sort of semi-worldly, semi-grown-up gift she seemed most amenable to at the time). In those days W came out in large-size tabloid format, like a super-colorful newspaper printed on semi-glossy paper.

Subsequent to my daughter's subscription-days, the W editors commissioned a series of characteristically ambitious & self-conscious photo-spreads from diCorcia. These have now been brought together by Italian publisher Damiani. Above, I have larded a few of the W pictures in along with other personal favorites by this bold practitioner of the staged photograph, the conceptual photograph, the photograph that fights with its own apparent narrative.