The American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951) is known for creating images that are poised between documentary and theatrically staged photography. Born in Hartford, Connecticut/U.S.A, he studied photography at the University of Hartford in the 1970s, and later at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and at Yale University, where he received his M.F.A. in 1979. DiCorcia is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has held solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. He currently lives and works in New York.

For his 2003 project A Storybook Life, diCorcia selected 76 photographs spanning three decades of his career, presenting them in a specific order. Conceived as neither a single body of work nor a mere sampling of past photographs, A Storybook Life instead constructs its meaning and narrative in part through the juxtaposition of images, which encourage a kind of free association. Rather than existing as a traditional narrative documentary sequence they serve as an exploration of the emotional effect of image after image. Unlike diCorcia’s other projects, for which he hired models or photographed strangers on the street, almost all of the subjects peopling these pictures are drawn from his own life. DiCorcia photographed friends and family in shots that appear completely candid, but in actuality involved hours of staging and elaborate lighting techniques to blur the lines between the everyday and the fabricated.