"By arranging flashes and stationing his camera at a precise location, he suspended slices of time in images that have the quiet stillness of Old Master paintings. For... Heads (2000–01) , he took thousands of photographs, of which he selected only a handful for inclusion. Unlike other practitioners of street photography, diCorcia never wanted his images to propagate a moral truth or instigate social change." MoMA"In Heads, for instance, an adolescent boy in a baseball cap is, as DiCorcia put it in his artist's tour of the show earlier this week, "pure Holden Caulfield". Next to him, a young girl is freeze-framed with "a perfect Botticelli wind blowing through her hair". Both seem oddly unreal in the way that many of DiCorcia's portraits are: they emerge out of the darkness with other ghostly faces dancing around them, each lost in their own reverie. Though the context is set up, the results capture the intimate naturalism of faces picked out in the hustle and bustle of New York streets, but the clamour of Times Square is silenced by the darkness that lies just beyond this cinematic lighting." Sean O'Hagan, 14 Feb 2014, The Guardian"For the new photographs a strobe was affixed to scaffolding in Times Square; Mr. DiCorcia stood farther away than before, using a longer lens. The result: crisp and stark portraits picked out of murky blackness -- just heads,... The surroundings now blocked by the scaffolding. They are simpler images and more intimate, the paradox of standing farther away being enhanced intimacy. The strobe functions like the light of revelation, a high-beam from heaven, and as usual, by stopping time, the photographs incline us to look at what we see every day but fail to notice, although the longer we stare at these people the more extraordinarily impenetrable they seem. Unaware of the camera, they are absorbed in thought or gaze absently; they are how we act most of the time, walking down the street, in a crowd, focused on something or nothing. But enlarged and isolated, their expressions become riddles, intensely melodramatic and strangely touching. Mr. DiCorcia's pictures remind us, among other things, that we are each our own little universe of secrets, and vulnerable. Good art makes you see the world differently, at least for a while, and after seeing Mr. DiCorcia's new ''Heads,' ' for the next few hours you won't pass another person on the street in the same absent way." Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, 14 Sept 2001
# B82988