This image is part of Philip-Lorca DiCorcia's 2003 project A Storybook Life, a selection of seventy-six photographs taken over two and a half decades that the artist compiled into a book. The photographs are carefully staged, although they appear to capture fleeting moments in ordinary life. By arranging initially unrelated images into a specific sequence, DiCorcia pieces together the semblance of a narrative from the sum of many banal moments. This photograph, number 45 in the series, shows a tense man turning his back on the warm glow of his room as he gazes out of a window into the dusk.

Adapted from

Anna Katherine Brodbeck, ed., TWO X TWO X TWENTY: Two Decades Supporting Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art), 2018, 56.

• Art Institute of Chicago
  Read more about DiCorcia's series, A Storybook Life.