When Keith Richards arrived for a photo shoot with Sante D’Orazio, he cut open a bag of cocaine with a six-inch blade and handed it to the photographer, how could D’Orazio say no? Working with rock stars, fashion models and movie stars, his attitude was always “if you can do it, I’ll do it,” he told the Observer. The same was true when it came to smoking weed in Harrison Ford’s trailer or meeting Mickey Rourke at five in the morning for a selfie. He was never one to turn down a good lesson or a good time. His intimacy with his models, which is apparently the secret of his photography success, is due to his “openness as a human being.”
D’Orazio is an open book, and his memoir, A Shot in the Darkpublished by Blackstone last year, offers a close-up of his most revealing moments—kind and dignified, seductive and tragic. On the outside, the 70-year-old photographer has lived a glamorous life, or at least a life close to glamorous. Working for magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue, he shot almost everyone who was anyone in the fields of movies, music, fashion and celebrities in the 1980s and 1990s: Elton John, John Travolta, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Willis, Cher, Pink, Prince and Sophia Loren among them. But even though he makes a living shooting fashion magazines, his real subject is nudity—”a common language in art history,” as he puts it. “I worship the divine feminine. Over the years, we’ve developed that image of the divine feminine through goddesses: Isis, Venus, Diana, Mona Lisa. And in popular terms, even Marilyn Monroe. But for me it was Pam Anderson.”
As D’Orazio is willing to point out, both in his memoir and in his interview with us, life in the fast lane is not without its bumps. “That’s why I wrote this book,” he says. “I want people to know that not all that glitters is gold.” Having worked for fashion magazines, she understands better than anyone that fashion images are largely an illusion, hiding the hard truth beneath sun-kissed skin and designer clothes.
Born in 1956 to Italian parents, Sante grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by a mix of people: “Italians, Jews, some Irish, and a few others” but also “pockets of low-class gangs.” Although there was an artistic lineage in his family—his mother was an opera singer before the war—D’Orazio was introduced to art at a church with its Catholic image, an interest many people in his early gatherings shared. “Nobody ever talked about Leonardo,” he writes A Shot in the Dark“unless you meant the pizzeria down the block.”
After studying commercial art and hating it, he enrolled at Brooklyn College to study fine art, which was “pure heaven.” As luck would have it, photographer Lou Bernstein lived around the corner, and one day, he asked young D’Orazio if he wanted to learn photography. At the age of 19, he joined Bernstein’s Friday night classes, where the photographer taught a school of photography influenced by philosophy, especially the principles of aesthetic truth. “Basically, the premise is that the way you see the world is the way you see yourself,” D’Orazio explained. “You can analyze yourself by the images you create or attract because, in fact, everything is about creating your own image.”
After 50 years, he still believes that everything he does is a reflection of himself. Whether he’s shooting Mike Tyson or Nicole Kidman, a fashion campaign or nude, you can even see it in his artistic photos. Stylistically, however, most of D’Orazio’s photographs are simple: a single model, unadorned, minimal props. (If there are props, you notice theirs, like Mike Tyson’s pet tiger or Axl Rose’s naked skull.) In terms of setup, he’s relatively economical: one camera, one lens, usually one assistant. His wasn’t the kind of overcrowded editorial photos that read like movie sets. And it’s that simplicity, and his tendency to get close to his models, that creates an intimacy in his photos. “How do you get someone to open up? You open up first,” he says. Even in his commercial photos, D’Orazio sees himself and his upbringing, “my mother is very religious and my father is a pagan. Life and art are the same. My father has Playboy magazines in the basement and my mother prays three times a day upstairs, those are two sides of me. I let them both work.”
A Shot in the Dark it reveals two seemingly contradictory aspects of D’Orazio: the pleasure-seeker and the pain-sufferer. He has plenty of stories of escape and daring: an arrest in Thailand, a new hotel in Mexico, a bad drug scam on Amazon. He also, by his own accounts, spent time with all the drugs, at all the parties, with all the celebrities. He writes: “The irony was that I was working in the light, but emotionally, I was living in the dark.” D’Orazio has a problem with depression that he says he got from his mother, as is the case with many artists, creating is part of his therapy. Photography “always helped me get out of those dark times in my life. But it was also in those dark times that I became sensitive to the world. If I’m not creating, I’m hurting myself—not physically, but emotionally. That’s when things get dark.”
In recent years, he has faced health problems. In his early 50s, he contracted E. coli and fainted. At some point, he disintegrated and technically died. After losing consciousness, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for five years. Add to that a list of other physical ailments—two rotten knee surgeries over the years between them. After that operation, “he couldn’t shoot, sometimes I couldn’t tie my shoes. He was given OxyContin, which led to addiction. He admits: “In fact, I fell off the chart, so to speak, as a photographer. “But I went back to painting. I was able to draw. And I was able to create. That was a healing process.”
Now 70, D’Orazio says he’s ready for new assignments, though he’s well aware of how the industry has changed and is quick to say that advertising is “still deaf” and no longer interested in “pretty pictures.” Despite that, he hasn’t lost his enthusiasm or his belief in the power of photography. He says: “I’m ready to shoot anytime. “And if no one calls, I call myself.” The bad boy may be living a quiet life these days—his vices are cigarettes and the occasional drink—but his passion for photography is still as burning as ever. Not a day goes by, he says he doesn’t photograph or paint. After spending his whole life, he still clings to one thing: art.
Many Art Conversations
