W Magazine (Bride), 2003
Sergio & Toti, 1985
Mike Miller, 24 years old, Allentown, Pennsylvania, $25, 1990-92
Tim, 1990
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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 1997-2008. When 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.