Davide Sorrenti

Davide Sorrenti (July 9, 1976 – February 4, 1997) was a fashion photographer, son of photographer and advertiser Francesca Sorrenti, and brother of Mario Sorrenti (born 1971) and Vanina Sorrenti (born 1973), also fashion photographers.

Davide Sorrenti was born 1976 in Naples, Italy, in a family of talented photographers (unofficially they have become known as the Corleones of fashion photography); his mother Francesca Sorrenti, renowned fashion photographer, as well as his five-year older brother Mario; and his sister Vanina, (after his death) also proved to be a talented photographer.

The Sorrentis moved to New York in the early 1980s, partly because Sorrenti had thalassemia (or Cooley's anemia, a hereditary form of anemia), and needed regular blood transfusions and medical care; a burden that is believed to at least partially have caused him to take comfort in drugs. The disease made him look several years younger than his real age. His brother Mario documented his sufferings one of many nights, published in the book The machine; referring to the drug infusion pump that Davide was hooked up to.

Growing up in a cultivated environment, Sorrenti painted, played golf and liked opera, but he soon also became a "prep-school gangster"; private-school students living a wannabee gangster’s life, with shoplifting, credit-card scams and drug dealing as a way of gaining status. He also started the crew SKE while attending Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities, with fellow skateboarders and graffiti artists (Davide’s tag was Argue); with whom he formed a rap group called the Mosaics, because of their wide mix of ethnicities; and started the streetwear label Danücht.

Sorrenti began documenting his friends in their everyday actions at the age of 18, developing his own distinctive personal style and sense of fashion. Around age 19, his darkly glamorous photos appeared in magazines like Interview, Detour, and Ray Gun. With his talent, charm, and juvenile good looks, he quickly became New York’s fashion Wunderkind, boosting the heroin chic-trend with young skinny waif-models appearing as drug addicts. A promising member of Generation X, Sorrenti was known for his photographs of seemingly strung-out models in stupor-like poses that, some felt, emulated the blank look of the heroin addict and glamorized drug use. Based on reports from the BBC’s Online, Sorrenti fell in love with teenage model Jaime (James) King, herself a heroin addict, and Sorrenti quickly partook in substance abuse. Vulnerable due to his thalassemia, and a lethal injection of a quantity “not normally considered unusual,” Sorrenti was dead within six months.

...
Wikipedia