Head #7

To create his Heads series, diCorcia rigged a powerful strobe light to a scaffold high above the street in New York’s Times Square. He activated the strobe by radio signal and captured unwitting pedestrians in a flash of light from over 20 feet away. Remarkably, the strobe was imperceptible to his subjects since the photographs were taken in broad daylight. Using this technique, the figures appear to emerge from inky darkness, spotlighted and haloed and as if there was almost no distance between the camera and the subject. Over the course of two years diCorcia took more than 4,000 of these photographs, though he chose only 17 for the series.