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.
And what about Davide? What was he doing?
Davide was a sponge; he absorbed from his whole family, he would work with me and Mario, and with his stepdad, who was a children’s photographer and who is now Mario’s business manager; he played a huge role for Davide, showing him how to use a camera, and the dark room. He never went out without a camera around his neck. He got a camera when he was 17. We gave him a Contax for Christmas, but we had tons of cameras around. Mario had lent him one; he has his own apartment, and Davide was always there, touching Mario’s stuff! He once saw a picture of him with a camera and Mario said, “That’s my Miyama!” Also, Glen [Luchford] was very close to Davide, encouraging him. I would take him out of the country on my shoots, and we all lived in my studio. When I was editing film, he would help me, and when he would shoot I would help him. He’d say to me, “Ma, come look at my shoot. What do you think?”
How did he go from shooting for himself to shooting professionally?
Richard [Pandiscio, the former creative director of Interview] invited me to dinner, and I took Davide along. Davide was talking to Richard in his homeboy lingo—he refused to have any normality; he would call me his shawty, and I would say, “Davide, I am your mother,” and he would laugh his funny laugh. He was looking at Richard’s books, and they got into a conversation about art and photography, and Richard was fascinated by him, because Davide was into everything—golf, Snoop Dogg, opera, skateboarding—he was all over the place, he just loved life.
Later that night, Davide said to me, “Richard wants me to do a story about my high school prom,” which in the end never came about because Davide said his high school prom was wack. And then he met Ingrid [Sischy, editor of Interview], and she gave him a story, and that was his first job; it’s a compilation of four pictures in the book. He came home from doing that all excited, and then he got a bigger commission on skateboarding. He shot it in Union Square, and I went by and I was sort of mesmerized by him. He was so professional, and he shot just like me—he was fast and he knew what he wanted. I was so proud that he wanted to see the clothes first; that had rubbed off on him from me.