Artifacts | Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Perfect Eleven

One thing to love about fashion is its extravagance. Fashion wouldn’t be fashion without it. What matters is the look. It has to dazzle the eye before anything else, and so do the photographs that sell it. It’s the image that counts and Philip-Lorca diCorcia is one photographer who knows from imagery. The fashion spreads he created for W magazine from 1997 through 2008 are lavish productions that don’t just illustrate a moment in style but tell a story about representation itself.

In the 11 years diCorcia collaborated with Dennis Freedman, the magazine’s former creative director (and now Barneys creative director), no penny was spared to set the clothes of each period in a context that casts a seductive spell of its own. Each photo essay features diCorcia’s distinctive, Caravaggio-like lighting and is set in a different part of the world — Bangkok, Cairo, São Paulo, Havana, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and East Hampton. The settings are often surreal and as different as a hotel hallway, a sweat shop, a Cuban bar straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, a white-shoe church, a kickboxing ring and Windows on the World, the restaurant that once sat atop the World Trade Center.

A choice selection of the photographs make up “Eleven,” diCorcia’s new exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, but they are all collected in a new book edited by Freedman, also entitled “Eleven,” that features a new story by the novelist Mary Gaitskill and an interview with diCorcia by the artist Jeff Rian, an editor of “Purple.” (Freedman and diCorcia will both be at the gallery tomorrow from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for a book signing.)

Each photograph derives from a tale that diCorcia concocted for the shoots, but separated from the magazine where the stories originally appeared, it is his gift as an image maker that stands out, not the fashions that were his subjects. In one striking picture from the Cairo shoot, there is no designer wear in evidence; the models are a local boy and his grandmother, and the only object in focus is a bouquet of artificial flowers.

It looks more like diCorcia’s art photography than anything typical of a fashion magazine. The same is true of the rest. Picked out of a crowd on a Paris street, Isabelle Huppert appears the same way as the anonymous faces caught unawares in diCorcia’s celebrated “Heads” series. The image of two men in a bar, where they seem to have discovered a soul mate in each other, recall his set-up pictures of L.A. hustlers. But a photograph of a naked man showering before the people at cocktail party in a Park Avenue living room is pure fantasy of the most delectable sort.

For diCorcia, the main difference between his art and fashion photos, he said the other day, is that “real people have no expectations but models do. They’re used to the idea that fashion photography is not the most glamorous experience.” But he wasn’t entirely prepared for the parents who accompanied their children to the shoot he did in Brazil. “On the other hand,” he said, “if you tell someone from a third-world country that you want to use their children in photography, they have every right to be suspicious.”
In fact, Freedman gave diCorcia extraordinary license (and funds) to do whatever he wanted. Sometimes the locations themselves determined the image. Other times it was the stylist Joe Zee, who supplied whatever clothes took his fancy. Or it was both, as in a photo of a woman standing on a ladder in an empty São Paulo hotel banquet room, who is reaching into its spectacular ceiling lights in her wedding dress. “I don’t know why Joe brought that dress,” diCorcia said the other day. “Figuring out a picture ahead of time, planning it, I hate that. But once you get there, everything changes.”

The model Nadja Auermann certainly seems an anomalous figure in the Bangkok sweat shop, and even more out of place (and sexier) leaning into the kickboxing ring in Bangkok. A woman seen in the reflection of a Cairo store window does not appear to be modeling anything, just watching the action on the street. As for the World Trade Center picture, taken in 2000, diCorcia wasn’t concentrating on the top of the tower in the background, only the story of two women awkwardly dealing with the call boy they are taking to lunch. Now the photo is a kind of memorial to a once-everyday setting that has become historic.

It doesn’t look real, but that’s fine in the world of fashion, where the higher the drama the better it is. It’s diCorcia’s sense of “irreality,” as he calls it, that serves his photographs best.

“Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Eleven” continues through March 5 at the David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street.