When Keith Richards arrived for a photo shoot with Saints of Horaceopened a bag of cocaine with a six-inch blade and offered it to the photographer, how could D’Orazio refuse? Working with rock stars, fashion models and movie stars, his attitude has always been “if you do it, I’ll do it,” he tells the Observer. The same was true when it came to smoking marijuana Harrison Fordhis trailer or meeting Mickey Rourke at five in the morning for a spontaneous shoot. He has never turned down a good subject or a good time. His closeness with his models, supposedly the secret to his photographic success, comes from “just being open as a person.”
D’Orazio is an open book and his memoirs, A shot in the darkpublished by Blackstone last year, offers a close-up view of his most revealing moments – lustful and solemn, seductive and regretful. By the looks of it, the 70-year-old photographer has led a glamorous life, or at least one close to glamorous. Working for magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue, he shot almost everyone who was in the realms of film, music, fashion and celebrity in the 1980s and 90s: Elton John, John Travolta, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Willis, Cher, PINK, prince AND Sophia Loren between them. But while he made a living shooting for fashion magazines, his real subject is the nude – “the common language in art history”, as he says. “I worship the divine feminine. Over the years, we’ve developed that symbolism of the divine feminine through the goddesses: Isis, Venus, Diana, Mona Lisa. And pop-wise, even. Marilyn Monroe. But for me, it was Pam Anderson.”
As D’Orazio is keen to point out, both in his memoir and in his conversation with us, life in the fast lane is not without its speed bumps. “That’s why I wrote the book,” he says. “I want people to know that not all that glitters is gold.” Having made a career working for fashion magazines, he understands better than anyone that fashion images are largely a deception, hiding a harsher reality beneath the suntanned skin and designer dresses.
Born in 1956 to Italian parents, Sante grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by an eclectic mix of people: “Italians, Jews, some Irish and other minorities,” but also “pockets of low-level mobsters.” Although there was an artistic background in his family – his mother was an opera singer before the war – D’Orazio was introduced to art through the church and its Catholic iconography, an interest that not many people in his early circles shared. “Nobody ever talked about Leonardo,” he writes in 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.” How lucky he would be, photographer Lou Bernstein lived around the corner and one day, he asked a young D’Orazio if he wanted to learn photography. At the age of 19, he joined Bernstein’s Friday evening classes, in which the photographer learned a school of photography influenced by philosophy, especially the principles of aesthetic realism. “Basically, the premise is that the way you see the world is the way you see yourself,” D’Orazio explains. “You can analyze yourself through the images you create or draw because, really, everything is a self-portrait.”
Fifty years later, he still believes that everything he does is a self-portrait. Be it hunting Mike Tyson OR Nicole Kidmana fashion campaign or a nude, he sees himself even in his most elaborate photos. Stylistically, however, most of D’Orazio’s pictures are simple: one model, no embellishments, minimal props. (When there are props, you notification those, like with Mike Tyson’s pet tiger or the skull held by a bat Axl Rose.) In terms of setup, it is just as frugal: a camera, a lens, usually just an assistant. His weren’t those overstuffed editorial photoshoots that read like film sets. And it is the simplicity, plus his tendency to bond with his models, that accounts for the intimacy in his photographs. “How do you get someone to open up? You open up first,” he says. Even in his commercial shoots, D’Orazio sees himself and his upbringing, “my mother is very religious and my father is pagan. Life and art are one and the same. My father has Playboy magazines in the basement and my mother who prays three times a day upstairs, those are the two sides of me. I let them both work.”
A shot in the dark presents two seemingly contradictory aspects of D’Orazio: the one who seeks pleasure and the one who endures pain. He has a series of stories of escape and daring: arrest in Thailand, burning down a hotel in Mexico, an ill-fated drug scam in the Amazon. He also, by his own accounts, spent time on every drug, at every party, with every celebrity. “The paradox,” he writes, “was that I was working with the light, but emotionally, I was living in the dark.” D’Orazio suffers from depression, which he says he inherited from his mother, and like many artists, creating is part of his cure. Photography “has always helped me get out of those dark times in my life. But it’s also in those dark times that I became more 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 also struggled with physical health problems. In his early 50s, he contracted E. coli and went into an induced coma. At one point, he flattened out and was technically dead. After the coma, he dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder for five years. Add to that a list of other physical ailments—two botched knee surgeries in as many years between them. After these operations, he “couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t tie my shoes sometimes. Also, I was in constant pain.” He was given OxyContin, which led to addiction. “I basically fell off the charts, so to speak, as a photographer,” he admits. “But I went back to painting. I was able to paint. And I was able to be creative. That was the healing process.”
Now 70, D’Orazio says he is ready for new tasks, although he is clear about how the industry has changed and is quick to say that advertising has “failed” and he no longer cares about “great photography”. Despite this, he has not lost his enthusiasm or his belief in the power of the image. “I’m ready to shoot at any time,” he says. “And if nobody’s calling, I’m calling myself.” The former bad boy may be living a quieter life these days – his vices are cigarettes and the occasional drink – but his passion for photography is as burning as ever. Not a day goes by, he says, when he doesn’t photograph or paint. After a lifetime of partying, he’s still connected to one thing: creativity.
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