Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Hustlers and the broken dreams of Hollywood

Philip-Lorca diCorcia occupies a unique place in contemporary American photography because much of his work stems from a contradiction: he uses reality to construct images that appear fictional, and he employs fictional techniques to create photographs that ultimately reveal something profoundly real. His scenes may seem like moments captured by chance on a street, in a motel, or in a room, but behind this apparent spontaneity often lies meticulous preparation of the lighting, camera position, and the relationship between the subject and the space.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951, diCorcia studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before completing a master's degree in photography at Yale in 1979. From his earliest work, he began to distance himself from both traditional documentary photography and fully staged photography. He was interested precisely in the territory between these two extremes. He initially photographed friends and family in everyday situations that appeared to have occurred spontaneously, although many had been carefully arranged. A person might appear looking out a window, resting in a room, or performing a seemingly trivial action, while hidden flashes and calculated lighting transformed that ordinariness into something strangely cinematic.

This photograph is one of my all-time favorites; it's pure genius by DiCorcia. Aside from the complementary colors of green and red, which always enhance any photograph, here DiCorcia uses the lamppost to cross out the "Y" in Mayfair Market, leaving it as "Affair Market," which can be perfectly translated into English as "The market of love affairs"... Like I said, pure genius.

DiCorcia soon understood that photography didn't have to choose between finding an image and constructing one. It could do both simultaneously. This idea would become essential to his entire career and would reach one of its most powerful expressions in Hustlers, the project he carried out in Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992.

To understand Hustlers, one must place oneself in the United States of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The country was going through the so-called culture wars, a political and social confrontation surrounding issues such as sexuality, homosexuality, religion, obscenity, and the limits of public funding for the arts. The controversy sparked by Robert Mapplethorpe's work had become one of the most visible cases of that battle, and the National Endowment for the Arts was under intense political pressure.

DiCorcia had received a scholarship from this institution and decided to respond to that environment in a highly ironic way. During several trips to Los Angeles, he began to locate men who worked as prostitutes in the vicinity of Santa Monica Boulevard and Hollywood. He would ask them approximately how much they charged a client and offer them a similar amount, but instead of paying for sex, he paid to have their picture taken.

From the outset, the procedure contained an obvious provocation. A portion of public money subject to moral restrictions was indirectly ending up in the hands of people whose activities and sexuality were precisely at the heart of those discussions. However, Hustlers quickly grew beyond that initial political response. What could have remained a conceptual exercise became a much more complex investigation into money, the body, identity, desire, representation, and, above all, the enormous dream-making machine that was Hollywood.

Los Angeles doesn't just function as a backdrop in Hustlers; it's one of its main characters. In the early nineties, certain areas of Santa Monica Boulevard were far removed from the glamorous image the film industry exported to the world. Cheap motels, gas stations, restaurants, parking lots, prostitution, drugs, traffic, and vast spaces built around the automobile were all part of the everyday landscape.

Many of the young people who frequented that area had come from other states. Their places of origin, later incorporated by diCorcia into the photographs' titles, indirectly trace a map of the United States. Texas, Colorado, Nevada, California, and other parts of the country appear behind the subjects. Los Angeles had functioned for generations as a colossal promise: arriving in California meant being able to become someone else, start over, be discovered, make money, find success, or simply escape from where one came from.

But reality could be found at the exact opposite extreme. In Hustlers, this gap between the promise and what actually happens is a constant presence. They are, in a way, shattered dreams. Men who had arrived in the city of dreams are found waiting by highways, in motel rooms, restaurants, and parking lots, trying to scrape together a few dozen dollars. DiCorcia photographs the flip side of the Hollywood dream, paradoxically using some of the same visual mechanisms with which Hollywood constructs its fantasies. His characters seem like actors in a film, but the film never existed. Hollywood promised to turn anonymous people into stars; DiCorcia transforms, for a few seconds, anonymous men from Santa Monica Boulevard into the protagonists of an extraordinarily sophisticated image.

That contradiction is one of Hustlers' greatest strengths. The lighting might remind you of a film production or an advertising campaign, but what we're seeing isn't a studio fantasy. The motels exist, the roads exist, and the people exist too. The fictional element is introduced through the construction of the cinematography.

DiCorcia carefully prepared many of his locations before finding his subjects. He would study the place, decide where to position the camera, and analyze how to combine the existing lighting with artificial flashes. He might work in a motel room, next to a restaurant, in a parking lot, or on the side of a road, first creating the necessary conditions for a photograph to take place there. Then he would look for the person who would inhabit that setting.

This procedure somewhat reverses the usual logic of portraiture. The photographer didn't always first find an interesting person and then decide how to photograph them. Often, he would prepare the setting and wait to find the subject capable of inhabiting it. When they appeared, the session could unfold quite quickly. The photographer controlled the overall structure of the image, but the subject introduced what was impossible to plan.

This is precisely where the characteristic tension of Hustlers emerges. The set may be staged and the lighting calculated, but the man who appears before the camera is still a real person whose biography diCorcia cannot fabricate. His expression, his clothes, the way he sits, the way he leans against a wall, or simply the way he looks introduces information that belongs to his very existence.

Fiction and documentary are then trapped within the same image.

The use of light is fundamental to achieving this. DiCorcia possesses an extraordinary ability to introduce artificial lighting without completely destroying the believability of the space. A flash can blend with the light of a streetlamp, the glow of a motel, a shop window, or the existing street lighting. The scene acquires a cinematic intensity, yet retains enough elements of reality to make it difficult to determine where one thing ends and another begins.

The photographs look like stills from unfamiliar films. That feeling is important because we immediately try to piece together a narrative. We want to know who that man is, why he's there, what he was doing before the photograph was taken, and what happened afterward. DiCorcia doesn't provide those answers. He builds up just enough information to spark our imagination and then withdraws.

The viewer ends up mentally writing the movie.

The titles in Hustlers further intensify this mechanism because diCorcia chose to identify the photographs using a combination of name, age, place of origin, and amount paid. Suddenly, an image that might seem like a cinematic portrait acquires an economic dimension. The number at the end of the title alters everything we've just seen.

Twenty dollars. Thirty. Forty. Fifty.

It's not necessary to list these amounts to understand their significance. They are small figures that carry enormous weight within the context of the photograph. They represent approximately what each man could ask for his work and, at the same time, what diCorcia decided to pay for the temporary presence of his camera.

This brings us to one of the project's most unsettling yet insightful aspects. DiCorcia replaces one transaction with another. The conventional client pays for access to a person's body for a period of time; the photographer pays to obtain their availability, their presence, and ultimately their image for a period of time. In both cases, there is money, negotiation, and the use of the body, even though the resulting product is entirely different.

The photographer thus becomes another kind of client.

The decision to include the price in the title prevents us from viewing the photographs simply as beautiful, melancholic portraits. The financial transaction remains attached to each image. It also introduces a contradiction that has become even more apparent over the years: those men received relatively small sums for posing, while the photographs they feature ended up in major museums, galleries, and international collections.

DiCorcia does not attempt to resolve that contradiction. He leaves it within the project.

It is also significant that Hustlers, despite revolving around male prostitution, is visually very unexplicit. Sex practically disappears. Many of the protagonists are simply waiting, sitting, walking, or remaining motionless in anonymous locations. This absence shifts the focus of the project from sexuality to something much broader and perhaps more unsettling: waiting.

Men seem to be constantly waiting for something. It might be a client, money, an opportunity, or simply for the night to end. But within the context of Los Angeles, that waiting inevitably takes on another meaning. It can also be interpreted as waiting for what the city itself had promised.

And there the broken dreams return once again.

For decades, Hollywood had been building a mythology based on anonymous people who arrived from anywhere in the United States and could suddenly become someone. The statistical reality of that fantasy was always brutally different. For every person who became a star, there were thousands who remained invisible. Hustlers seems to place its camera precisely among those who were left out of the frame of Hollywood's grand fiction.

There is something particularly perverse and fascinating about diCorcia's use of cinematic visual techniques to photograph them. During the exposure, they receive what Hollywood had denied them: lighting, a setting, direction, and a camera focused entirely on them. For a fraction of a second, they cease to be anonymous figures on Santa Monica Boulevard and become protagonists.

But when the exhibition ends, they are still in the same place.

The photograph preserves the dream; they return to reality.

This tension also explains why Hustlers doesn't simply function as a documentary project about male prostitution. Had that been the primary intention, diCorcia could have followed the protagonists, photographed clients, rooms, negotiations, and sexual encounters, constructing a much more explicit social narrative. He chooses not to. He's less interested in explaining how prostitution works than in using that reality to explore how we construct identity through images.

The historical context adds another important layer. The photographs were taken between 1990 and 1992, when the United States was still deeply affected by the AIDS epidemic. The disease was shrouded in fear and accompanied by a profound stigma surrounding homosexuality and sex work. Hustlers inevitably emerges within this climate, though diCorcia avoids turning his subjects into medical or sociological symbols. We don't necessarily know their sexual orientation, their personal circumstances, or the exact reasons that led them to prostitution. The photographer resists offering a reassuring explanation.

We know very little about them, and that lack of information is deliberate.

In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Strangers, an exhibition that brought together photographs taken during the preceding years and definitively consolidated his institutional recognition. It is difficult to ignore the paradox: men who had been photographed for very modest sums on the fringes of Hollywood ended up occupying the walls of one of the most important museums in the world.

Hustlers also marked a decisive shift in diCorcia's own work. In his early projects, he had frequently used friends and family members in staged situations. In Los Angeles, he discovered a formula that he would later develop in various ways: technically controlling almost all aspects of the photograph and allowing a stranger to introduce chance.

This principle would prove fundamental in Streetwork, where he set up cameras and lighting in urban spaces in different cities and photographed strangers entering predetermined areas. He would later take the procedure even further with Heads, using staged lighting to visually isolate anonymous pedestrians in Times Square. The street provided unpredictable subjects while the photographer controlled the structure within which they would be photographed.

Hustlers thus constitutes a kind of hinge in his career. It unites the carefully staged photography of his early years with his later interest in introducing strangers and chance into previously constructed photographic systems.

The project's publishing history is also unique. Although the images had begun circulating in the early 1990s, it wasn't until 2013 that Steidl published Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Hustlers as a monographic photobook dedicated specifically to the project. The volume, designed on a considerable scale, finally transformed the collection into a publishing experience capable of showcasing the cinematic power and visual richness of the photographs. It is currently a particularly interesting out-of-print photobook within diCorcia's published work and a significant title for photobook collectors.

But the importance of Hustlers far surpasses its status as a collectible photobook. What keeps the project alive more than thirty years later is the impossibility of reducing it to a single interpretation. It speaks of prostitution, but it is not simply a document about prostitution. It speaks of Hollywood, but it practically never shows the recognizable Hollywood of the films. It speaks of sexuality without needing to show sex. It speaks of exploitation without establishing a simple division between exploiter and exploited. And it speaks of fiction using people whose reality inevitably ends up permeating any construction prepared by the photographer.

DiCorcia controls the camera, the lighting, and the set, but there's one thing he can never fully control: the person standing in front of him. That small resistance of reality against fiction is probably the heart of Hustlers.

That's why photographs continue to produce such a strange feeling. They're too perfect to seem entirely documentary and too real to work as fiction. The people seem like actors, even though they aren't exactly playing someone else. The places seem like sets, even though they exist. The light seems cinematic, even though we're looking at a photograph. And each image seems to contain a complete story, even though we can only see a single instant.

Ultimately, Hustlers speaks to the gap between what an image promises and what actually lies behind it. It's a particularly powerful idea when the setting is Los Angeles, a city that has turned precisely that gap into an industry.

Hollywood manufactures dreams. Philip-Lorca diCorcia went a few kilometers beyond its studios to photograph what might remain when those dreams shattered.