Philip-Lorca diCorcia
[Artist, b. 1953, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture, the less happy I am with it.
Reality has become a parallel universe with photographers returning with different versions of what it truly looks like.
[Photography is a] hair-raising joy ride in a medium that, despite being a mechanical trick, can break down the division between mind and matter like a superhero, or an artist.
Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.
Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal—the border between what we see and what we suspect.
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.
In the beginning of my photography I controlled everything: rearranging the room, lighting it, and telling people what to do and where to put their hands. By the last project, I was basically totally at the mercy of serendipity.
The deepest motivation for a lot of artists is obviously the one they all share: their great fear they are a fraud. It’s a joke. In my case the problem is not that I don’t question myself. It’s just that I question other people even more...
