The year in photography monographs has officially commenced with a
squat but massive doorstopper from mid-career superstar Philip-Lorca
diCorcia. Thousand is about as compact as a 7-inch LP, but as
thick as a pair of phonebooks. It collects 1,000 of the artist’s
Polaroids from the past several decades, and reproduces each one alone
on ultra-thin pages. (These Polaroids aren’t the instamatic snaps of
the pre-camera phone era, but a similar technology that allows
professional photographers to proof their work in progress.)
Thousand doesn’t set any records for mass or density (Gerhard
Richter’s Atlas collects more than 5,000 images), but its bulky
heft certainly commands a shelf.
One of the most respected and emulated photographers alive, diCorcia
is frequently (and facilely) describedas the guy who most deftly toes
the line between staged and documentary photography. Early in his
career, he made photographs of friends and family that somehow looked
both entirely natural and completely cinematic; years later, he
discreetly installed studio lighting on posts and scaffolds in
Manhattan, redefining “street photography” with candid but dramatically
lit visions of urban life.
Thousand spans diCorcia’s career, but mostly avoids his
well-known works, which are indirectly and occasionally represented
through outtakes and preparatory studies. But overwhelmingly,
Thousand is comprised of the artist’s personal work: images made
without galleries in mind, ideas being tested and teased out. In this
way, the hulking collection combines the best of “deleted scenes”
tidbits and more intimate family albums.
But not everybody is so impressed: Early reviewers are howling at a
truly unorthodox approach the artist and publisher took in laying the
book out. In photography monographs, image sequencing is
everything—it’s how visual stories are told, and how meaning and
significance are implied. Sequencing is sacrosanct. But after untold
attempts to order the 1,000 photographs, diCorcia assigned a number to
each image, and let a computer randomly dictate their placement in the
book. Purists reacted as if diCorcia was torching a first printing of
Robert Frank’s Les Américains, and they’re missing the
point entirely. By relinquishing the storytelling impulse as much as
possible, diCorcia has indeed disrupted the traditional role of book
arts. Instead, he’s handed us the closest thing possible to an enormous
box of old Polaroids, allowing us to sift through it as we wish.