Merging detachment and intimacy

Female pole dancers -- nude and mostly nude -- will be on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art this summer. No, it's not a gambit to increase attendance. They are the subjects of a series of striking life-size photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia , whose work will be presented in the ICA's first full-scale solo artist exhibition in its new building.

A 1976 graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, diCorcia has been identified with the so-called Boston School of photography, whose best known other member is Nan Goldin. But diCorcia, who earned an MFA degree at Yale, has never practiced the kind of grittily personal, diaristic photography that Goldin is famous for.

DiCorcia is best known for uncannily vivid metropolitan street scenes that he produced in the 1990s. In these large-format color pictures, pedestrians appear frozen in unnaturally intense, raking light. Shot from a low angle, the pictures have a strangely dramatic quality, like stills from a Steven Spielberg movie showing scenes just before some enormous calamity.

Their look has much to do with how they were made. DiCorcia would set up his camera and place synchronized flash lamps in a selected location and repeatedly trigger his shutter as pedestrians passed by. The light and the angle of view give the people in his pictures a strangely heightened presence even while they appear anonymous.

Bennett Simpson , who recently left his position as ICA associate curator for a curator's post at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, organized the exhibition. "He's a very significant figure in photography," Simpson said of diCorcia by phone. "He's a bridge between the modernist tradition of street photography represented by artists like Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, and another, newer tradition of staged and artificially mediated approaches practiced by people like Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. "

There is an enigmatic tension between detachment and intimacy as well in DiCorcia's works from the '80s that first drew art-world attention to him: a series of portraits of male prostitutes in Los Angles whom the photographer paid to pose in nondescript hotel rooms or outdoor locations.

The pictures have a certain tenderness, but there is no sense of any personal relationship between the photographer and his subject. Each is titled with the man's name, where he came from, and how much he charges for a sexual encounter -- usually $25 or $30.

As for the pole dancers, they are from a series of 13 extra-large pictures called "Lucky Thirteen." In each, a different woman wearing a bikini or less hangs upside down on a vertical pole in a dark and empty club. They look as much like gymnasts as erotic entertainers, and, like diCorcia's street scenes, with their Caravaggio -esque lighting, these images have a historical resonance that calls to mind figures of goddesses, angels, and other mythic beings from Baroque paintings. (In his excellent catalog essay, Simpson compares them to crucifixions.) They are anything but pornographic, and yet they are viscerally sexy. Visitors will find it hard to tear their eyes away.

June 1-Sept. 3. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.