Davide Sorrenti was, in some ways, a nepo baby, having met stylists, models and photographers through his mom and older brother who moved before him in the fashion world. But lifelong challenges to his health and his natural gift for a melancholy documentary aesthetic shaped his art briefly into something that is still moving to behold.
I think there's also some important information included here that corrects the mass media trend towards criticizing so-called "heroin chic." I can say as someone who was a young person in the 90s that it never looked that way to me - I never liked Kate Moss or especially got into the particulars of how certain images reflected the drug world. The photographs often struck me as a form of Gothic romanticism, kind of a Neo-Victorian revival of the street urchin and/or the vaguely tubercular vampire look.
As people interviewed in this documentary point out, Davide's sincere love of photography was reflected in empathetic, captured moments in time of real life on the street, and how he reveled in seeing the essence of a person - including their flaws - in his photography. I honestly remember this aesthetic as being heavily linked to grunge, which is a philosophical antidote to the corporate capitalist, power-mad 80s.
Highly recommended if you're interested in art or photography from the era. Davide seemed like an awesome person, though I had no idea who he was until this documentary. I had only seen his famous photographs, which is fascinating and perhaps troubling - that Davide Sorrenti's art is not always recognized as being his.
