For this series, Philip-Lorca diCorcia walked along Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in search of models who would be prepared to pose in hotel rooms according to pre- planned scenarios. The artist explained that: “I went back to the street just like the ordinary clients of these prostitutes. I went up to them and mentioned the following: ‘I would like to take a photo of you, I will pay you exactly what you are paid for a pass’”.
“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account.
Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space.
The works of Philip-Lorca diCorcia oscillate between two possible definitions of photography – from a recording system in the tradition of documentary and a system of representation in the tradition of fiction...