Photos Show Poverty of Hollywood Hype

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs at PaceWildenstein are the stuff of pulp fiction: juicy, theatrical and damning. Seen for the first time on the West Coast, these images of male prostitutes, drifters and addicts, shot on and around Santa Monica Boulevard, revel in the seductions of the Hollywood dream machine while disclosing its utter poverty.

DiCorcia’s photographs are neither documentations a la Nan Goldin nor setups in the manner of Jeff Wall (though they conjure both). The photographer locates a site, arranges lighting, plots the camera angle, then scouts a willing subject. The titles--which list the subject’s name, his hometown and the fee he charges for posing--commemorate these brief encounters.

For $25, Ralph Smith, 21 years old, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., poses next to a brilliant turquoise Del Taco sign, not quite the next James Dean, but with pretensions. For only $20, the shirtless and rather unappealingly tousled Eddie Anderson, also 21, from Houston, stands outside a diner and peers in with a gaze that seems to go nowhere at all.

Clearly, these figures--who may or may not be hustlers, and who may or may not have given DiCorcia accurate information (who tells the truth in Hollywood?)--are selling themselves cheap. But in a very real sense, DiCorcia isn’t buying anything, for what we see are not individuals but types, emptied of their particularity and pictured as tawdry icons. What DiCorcia offers each one, then, is an arena in which to act out what is already an act.

This becomes particularly clear in the photograph of the barely dressed, well-muscled Gerald Hughes (also known as Savage Fantasy), who strides out of a glowing motel bathroom into the dark bedroom, his dangerously hunky physique juxtaposed with an oversized image of the comforting Bill Cosby, beaming down from a wall-mounted TV. If this image verges on platitude, it is the exception. For the most part, these fine photographs feel shockingly true to all kinds of realities.

* PaceWildenstein, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Nov. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.