Quotes by
Philip-Lorca diCorcia

l was never really particularly comfortable photographing people.

I find it very uninteresting, most of the time, to be involved in the art world... It’s just hard to spend that much time and that much effort on something that is enormously loaded with pretensions but everyone will admit has little or no effect on the world at large.

As a photographer you are completely dependent on the object. I have tried it the other way round, and started out by defining the process.

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.

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.

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.

Let's face it, there is nothing that is being said by any photojournalist that hasn't been said a million times before. It's just another example of man's inhumanity to man or, you know, chaos, violence and you know, special moments. It's good to be informed and maybe people need to see visual evidence of what's going on but it's been going on for centuries and the photographs themselves may differ but I think a corpse is a corpse is a corpse.

People represent things to me—they're not personal. Each person is a kind of archetype, which I manipulate to appear to be the archetype that I am thinking about, although most of the time they're not like that.

[My work] doesn’t begin with a really open investigation of something. I generally have a specific thing I am looking for, and I am looking to see if I can achieve that.

Psychology is a reality for many people. I try to show this. It may not, in fact, be the actual psychology of the subject that I portray, but it is played out in the image and the projection of that psychology into the surrounding space... Their image is the outward facing front belied by the inwardly gazing eyes.

Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks.

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...

Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal—the border between what we see and what we suspect.

[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.