Rarity 18.4/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 2/100 · Listings: 1 · Avg price: $51.41 · Min price: $51.41

These scores use the legacy monthly asking-price aggregate. They do not use the new exact-edition, condition, completeness, and destination-shipping rules.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia made the photographs in *Hustlers* between 1990 and 1992, during repeated trips to Los Angeles. Working around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, he approached male sex workers and paid each man the amount normally charged for his customary service—not for sex, but to appear before the camera. The resulting exchange is central to the work: portraiture, labor and transaction remain inseparable.

These pictures are neither candid street photographs nor conventional documentary portraits. DiCorcia scouted locations, constructed scenarios and arranged his subjects in motel rooms, vacant lots, fast-food restaurants and spaces between parked cars. Yet the casting came from the street, and each encounter was completed quickly. This collision of careful staging and contingent human presence gives the series its unsettled tone. Hollywood appears less as a center of fantasy than as its exhausted margin, where cinematic light and deliberate composition coexist with economic vulnerability.

The titles sharpen that tension by recording particulars such as a sitter’s name, age, place of origin and fee. They offer facts without resolving the person into a social category or a fictional character. The men collaborate in images whose narratives have been planned by the photographer, but their bearing, distance and opacity resist simple possession. DiCorcia’s method therefore complicates familiar distinctions between performance and disclosure, empathy and control, artifice and evidence.

Twenty-one photographs from the series were shown in *Strangers*, diCorcia’s first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1993. Published by Steidl in 2013, *Hustlers* presents the series in its entirety two decades later. For a serious photobook collection, its importance lies in that fuller view: the book allows the repeated structures of setting, payment, naming and pose to be read across the complete body of work. It is a concentrated study of one of diCorcia’s defining strategies—the use of elaborate photographic construction to make social reality more ambiguous, rather than less.