“THAT WHICH WAS NEVER REALLY HIDDEN, BUT RARELY IS NOTICED”: DICORCIA’S STORYBOOK LIFE, SIGNED

DICORCIA, Philip-Lorca. A Storybook Life. (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2003). Oblong quarto, original white cloth, original dust jacket. $400.

First trade edition of this “epic view” of stark everyday life, with 75 full-page color plates, signed on the title page by DiCorcia. A beautiful volume.

“DiCorcia’s works possess a reflective quality that goes against the grain of an image culture of instant consumption. Though immediately arresting, the real meaning of his images unfolds in time. The inner lives of his protagonists are intimated through gesture, glimpsed through doors left ajar or captured in one unguarded moment on a sidewalk. DiCorcia weaves these random moments into a complex narrative… A Storybook Life is presented through 75 works made over 20 years and edited and sequenced to suggest a network of interconnected lives and stories. The same protagonists re-appear at different stages of their lives. They rarely look at us or at each other—instead, they are absorbed in their own worlds of reflection… Moving between urban and rural, private and public, moments of connection and of intense isolation, A Storybook Life offers an epic view of everyday existence” (Whitechapel Art Gallery). “He borrows the tricks of fabricated Hollywood stills—harsh direct lighting, figures reflected on or through surfaces, sultry poses, a distancing between subject and object—to indirectly invite us into a disquieting world most of us would rather not think about” (Marlena Donohue). DiCorcia is interested in revealing, in his own words, “that which was never really hidden, but rarely is noticed” (Museum of Contemporary Photography). Preceded by a signed limited edition of only 100 copies.

Fine condition, signed.