Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

One of the seminal artists of contemporary photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia produces work that exists in a wide spectrum of fictionalized documentary. Yet a thematic and conceptual unity, most often realized in serial form and particularly suited to monograph format marks each series in his oeuvre. With Thousand, diCorcia inverts his own tendency: the monograph is now the work itself. The sheer volume of material, which spans over 20 years of personal and artistic creation, challenges the notion that editorial power can establish context and narrative. Any attempt to logically order the images proved futile. In this case, rather than conscious design creating rigid form, a computer-generated randomization determined order. DiCorcia assigned each Polaroid a value, which served as input for the computer-generated sequence; the randomized sequence provided the layout.