Hustlers, made by American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia from 1990 to 1992 around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, portrays male sex workers and other hustlers through carefully staged encounters. Originally conceived as Trade, the project uses the paid encounter between photographer and sitter to explore exchange, self-presentation, and the unstable boundary between documentary fact and photographic fiction. DiCorcia used money from a 1989 National Endowment for the Arts grant to compensate participants at amounts linked to their street rates, then incorporated each sitter's name, age, birthplace, and fee into the title. Made after his brother Max's death from AIDS in 1988, and amid the AIDS crisis and early-1990s culture wars, the series links Hollywood fantasy to precarious labor and social marginalization.
The men appear alone or, occasionally, in pairs within motel rooms, parking lots, cafes, curbs, bus stops, and exterior walkways. Color, artificial illumination, and precise framing transform these ordinary sites into cinematic tableaux, often organized around doorways, railings, windows, and other thresholds. Figures sit, stand, or move through the frame in an atmosphere of suspension and distance. The factual titles anchor each image to a specific exchange, while the invented scenarios resist straightforward reportage.
Across five or six trips from New York to Los Angeles, diCorcia selected a location, mounted a ground-glass camera on a tripod, arranged lights outside the frame, and used an assistant as a stand-in while testing composition and exposure with Polaroids. He then recruited a sitter from the nearby street and asked him to occupy the prepared position. Early sessions took place primarily in motel rooms before the project expanded outdoors, where twilight imposed a narrow working period. The resulting chromogenic prints retain a tension between formal control and unpredictable gestures, expressions, and street conditions.
The project first appeared publicly in MoMA's 1993 exhibition Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Strangers, diCorcia's first museum solo presentation. Selections later appeared in Reina Sofía's 1997-98 Hustler/Streetwork and in surveys at Foam, ICA Boston, LACMA, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, De Pont, and The Hepworth Wakefield. In 2013, David Zwirner presented thirty-six photographs, including twelve exhibited for the first time, while SteidlDangin published the complete sixty-six-work series. The book received Gold in the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2014, and Sprüth Magers mounted a dedicated Berlin exhibition that year.
