Hustlers

Hustlers gathers Philip-Lorca diCorcia's landmark series of staged portraits of male prostitutes, made in Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992 with support from a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

DiCorcia scouted motel rooms, vacant lots and street corners, then paid his subjects to pose within scenes he had already lit and composed, completing most shoots within the hour. Each photograph is titled with the sitter's name, age, hometown and fee, a device that folds the transaction itself into the work. Twenty-one images from the series were shown at MoMA in 1993 as diCorcia's first solo museum exhibition, Strangers; this volume, published by Steidl in 2013, reproduces the complete project of 66 photographs for the first time.

DiCorcia has spent his career working at the border between documentary and constructed photography, staging apparently candid street scenes with hidden strobes and elaborate setups. Hustlers sits alongside Streetwork and Heads as one of his best-known bodies of work built from anonymous strangers photographed in public space.