Davide Sorrenti’s Mother Reflects on Her Late Son, Whose Photography She’s Anthologized in a New Book
Davide Sorrenti, the New York photographer who died in 1997, at age 20, was, says his friend Lola Schnabel, “living in truth.” Now his mother, photographer Francesca Sorrenti, with London’s Idea Books, is publishing Davide Sorrenti ArgueSKE 1994 – 1997, a retrospective of her son’s work that more than supports Schnabel’s claim. (SKE stands for See Know Evil, the moniker that Sorrenti and his gang of friends and cohorts adopted, while Argue was his graffiti tag.) Naturalistic, authentic, and compelling, the images of Frankie Rayder, Milla Jovovich, Carolyn Murphy, and his girlfriend Jaime King, whom he was shooting editorially for the likes of Interview and Detour magazines, reflect the ’90s New York Sorrenti was living in. It was a city still in the shadows of a decimating 1987 recession and pulsing with rap, grunge, and skateboarding—cultures he knew intimately.
Sorrenti had his own shadows to deal with. He had a hereditary blood condition, thalassemia, and used heroin in the last year or so of his life. His death due to kidney failure was co-opted into the narrative around heroin chic, and fashion’s troubling flirtation with vacant-eyed models in less than salubrious settings, images which often referenced documentarians like Larry Clark or Nan Goldin. But as the conversation with Francesca Sorrenti that follows reveals, the truth of her gifted son’s life and work—he was the brother of photographers Mario and Vanina Sorrenti—was far more complex than that. And this book, as well as the 2018 documentary about Sorrenti, See Know Evil, reminds us that the best way to think about this young man is not what he left behind, but what he continues to give us.
Francesca, firstly, thank you for taking the time to speak. I’m sure putting together this book was an enormously emotional experience.
[The book is] bittersweet, that’s the best way to describe it: bittersweet. The documentary, the exhibition, and now the book...they are keeping him alive. Davide is eternally 20. He was 19 and a half when he passed, but it’s odd to say that, so I always say he was 20.
Can you tell me a little about the process of putting it together?
When I design a book, I always think [about] what the person reading it would like to see. In Davide’s case we are talking about memory, about photography, about a kid who projected his life through his images. If you see the documentary, you will see the book.
While you were his mother, you were also enormously supportive and encouraging of his photography. You both started to take pictures only a few years apart.
Davide and I...it was a mother-son relationship, but also a relationship to a child with a genetic illness. You tend to live through that child: God forbid he gets hurt, God forbid whatever. Out of my three children, he and I were most similar. He was a little harder [than me]...because he was ill. Kids, when they’re sick, they grow up saying, “Why me?”
Maybe at this point it would be useful to hear a little about how he came to photography, because you are this very creative force, and you’ve raised kids who are just as creative. Can you give me some family history?
My career was always about fashion. [The ’60s New York boutique] Paraphernalia, I worked there, with [now movie director] Joel Schumacher, but [laughs] I was a bit clubby, and I was always running off to [the legendary NYC hangout] Max’s [Kansas City]. I got married very young, left to go to Italy, opened two boutiques, then got robbed. My kids saw all this. I then worked for Fiorucci, so they grew up amidst beads and feathers and denim. After my marriage ended I moved to New York, started working as a stylist, and my three kids became child models; they were always part of this life. I became a fashion photographer in 1991, and my studio was buzzing with shoots, and my kids were always there. I thought Mario was going to become a painter—his father is an artist—and he got a scholarship to art, but wasn’t interested. Instead, Mario became a model and then a photographer.