Davide sorrenti biography
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Emotion comes up a lot in the recollections and impressions of his friends and collaborators who are in the book, that his work was so much a reflection of the life he lived.
Davide lived emotion in his life because he lived pain. Now I can talk about that as I am dealing with my own physicality. I think to myself, Wow, Davide, no wonder you pushed boundaries. I can’t equate my pain with his, but that’s where the sensitivity came from. He was there for the underdog. And he was a juvenile delinquent, pushing the boundaries, always with that giggle of his. Davide was otherworldly. How did someone create such a movement? How did this one little kid create so much love for 20 years?
You’ve always spoken fearlessly and honestly about his use of drugs, but, rightly, you’ve strongly refuted Davide being only about that.
Davide was a wild child. He smoked a lot of weed to deal with the pain. He had the bones of an 80-year-old, but was never stoned on a shoot, ever. When he shot, he w
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Images from Davide Sorrenti’s 90s archive are going up on Instagram
When Davide Sorrenti died in 1997, from a kidney failure brought on by a combination of heroin and a long-term health condition, it marked the pinnacle of the moral panic over ‘heroin chic’. The photographer, son of renowned fashion photographer Francesca Sorrenti and younger brother of Vanina and Mario Sorrenti, became a figurehead for the problems of New York’s 90s fashion scene, falling into drug abuse after explosive critical and commercial success before he’d even turned 21.
Through See Know Evil, a documentary film charting an ‘oral biography’ of Davide Sorrenti’s life, Charlie Curran wants to paint a more intimate portrait of the photographer, featuring interviews with those who knew him best. Now, through an accompanying Instagram, Curran seeks to show the long process of making this film – the Kickstarter for which was started all the way back in 2012.
The idea for @see_know_evil was formed when
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Davide Sorrenti Archive
Davide Sorrenti was a visionär photographer whose intimate portraits are a capsule of downtown New York City’s youth culture in the early 1990s. Sorrenti was born in Naples in 1976. At birth, the artist was diagnosed with Thalassemia Major, a genetic blood disorder that tragically took his life at the ung age of 21. Because of Davide’s diagnosis, the artist’s mother, fashion photographer Francesca Sorrenti, relocated Davide and his siblings, Vanina and Mario, from Italy to New York City in the early 1980s. At 17, Sorrenti began documenting his daily life in New York on film, shooting portraits of his family; friends in his graffiti and skate crew, SKE; and his girlfriend, model Jaime King.
Sorrenti’s body of work is a strikingly authentic personal konto that pulses with boundless love, vitality, and the raw fervor of ungdom. Unclouded bygd pretense, the artist captured a vibrant cultural moment in a city on the precipice of commodification. His keenly