Between 1997 and 2008, Philip-Lorca diCorcia completed 11 photographic portfolios in collaboration with W magazine's creative director Dennis Freedman. In their epic scope and visual luxuriance, these enigmatic and glamour-soaked photographic narratives stand as one of the most ambitious editorial projects of the last decade. DiCorcia and Freedman traveled the globe to make these stories, deploying fabulous locations ranging from a Lautner house in Los Angeles and the Mariinsky Opera House in St. Petersburg to Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center and a notorious "club échangiste" (swinger's club) in Paris. The cast of characters included iconic models Nadja Auermann, Guinevere van Seenus, Kristen McMenamy, Karen Elson, Shalom Harlow and Hannelore Knuts, the actress Isabelle Huppert, the designer Marc Jacobs plus people cast on location. DiCorcia's fashion stories are collected for the first time in this superbly designed monograph, and reveal themselves as a masterpiece of staged photography and photographic storytelling.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979. DiCorcia's work has been the subject of solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among others. He has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. His previous books include A Storybook Life (2003) and Thousand (2007), a collection of Polaroids that was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. DiCorcia lives and works in New York City.