"Room" is a relative term, too. Some of diCorcia's best-known photographs are of street scenes, and he's photographed exteriors the world over, from Salonika to Singapore to Wellfleet. Yet even these works have a faintly claustral quality, a rare capacity for conveying confinement. DiCorcia's city scenes remind us that a street is, in effect, a large open-air room; and his exterior shots are cut off by the frame conceptually no less than they are physically.
DiCorcia, a Hartford native who went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, got a master's of fine arts at Yale. His graduate thesis posited two types of filmmakers: those whose work exists as part of a world beyond what's on the screen (Renoir and Truffaut , for example), and those who present a world that seems to have no existence beyond the frame (such as Fritz Lang and Hitchcock ). It's the second to which diCorcia's photography declares its allegiance .
A cinematic quality has long been noted in his work, as if his images were stills in search of some ultimate director's cut. DiCorcia has a significant body of fashion and editorial work, none of it included in the show. It's easy to see how his style lends itself to such assignments. He often arranges his photos, and even his spontaneous pictures can feel staged. As Peter Galassi, photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, has written, diCorcia presents "suspended moments in unfolding narratives."
There's an abiding stillness to diCorcia's work. Lang and Hitchcock banished any world beyond the frame -- but at least another would come along 1/24th of a second later. For diCorcia, the banishment is total. No image precedes the one we see, and none follows. In that singularity lies much of the fascination of diCorcia's work, as well as its tendency to unsettle.
