Best of 2001 A Special Issue: Over the next twenty pages, ten Artforum contributors remember the high points of the past year.

Vince Aletti

1 Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Pace Wildenstein, New York) Because the subjects of diCorcia's larger-than-life head shots are unaware that their pictures are being taken, they exist in a weird state of grace. Hyperalert urban radar temporarily down, these pedestrians look touchingly vulnerable: alone and adrift. The photographer "cringes" at the idea that his work is humanistic and insists he's "not the slightest bit sympathetic" toward his subjects, yet he never thwarts our sympathy for them. DiCorcia's people are ordinary citizens of the twenty-first ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.