LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Whitechapel Art Gallery presents “Philip-Lorca diCorcia: A Storybook Life,” on view through 24 August 2003. One of America’s leading photographers, Philip-Lorca diCorcia combines a documentary tradition with the fictional worlds of cinema and advertising to create a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire. Alternating between the informality of the snapshot and the iconic quality of a staged composition, his play between real and artificial lighting, his eye for symbolic detail and his saturated colors give di Corcia’s street scenes and domestic interiors a psychological and emotional intensity.

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, the random moment is woven by diCorcia’s lens into a complex narrative.

His quiet dramas find new expression in two series premiered in this exhibition. In the New Gallery, Two Hours comprises images photographed from one position in the same street in Havana, Cuba over a two hour period. The city becomes a backdrop to the ebb and flow of humanity. Artificial lighting, triggered by the artist and hidden from view, invests the images with a sense of the dramatic that belies their spontaneity.

In the Upper Gallery A Storybook Life is presented through over 70 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; strangers come and go. They rarely look at us or at each other. Rather, they are absorbed in their own worlds of reflection beyond the field of the camera.

Domestic interiors and urban and rural landscapes provide a resonant backdrop, cinematically charged with a sense of threat or longing. A white picket -fenced house is perched incongruously in a barren landscape. A lush garden appears in a jungle of concrete and steel. A jumble of unopened Christmas presents languish beneath a heavily decorated tree. 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.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: A Storybook Life is part of an ongoing program strand at the Whitechapel assessing the work of an internationally renowned artist mid-career. Previous shows have included Jeff Wall (1996), Thomas Schütte (1998), Nan Goldin - Devil’s Playground, Rodney Graham (both 2002) and Cristina Iglesias (2003).

Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has been exhibiting his work for over twenty five years and has had solo shows throughout Europe, Japan and the USA. He teaches at Yale University and lives in New York. A Storybook Life is organized by Whitechapel Art Gallery, and will tour to Centre national de la photographie, Paris; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Centro de Arte de Salamanca.