A new book celebrates Davide Sorrenti’s journals, an archive of the people, passions and fleeting moments that would define his all too short life
In his 2019 documentary See Know Evil, filmmaker Charlie Curran gathers Davide Sorrenti’s friends and family to share their memories of the late photographer. Widely credited with reshaping what fashion imagery could look like in the 90s, Davide exposed the industry to a darker, more intimate sensibility, accessed via a keen understanding of the street (having grown up in 80s New York, where he moved from Naples as a kid), and an amplified relationship with mortality. Furnished with bittersweet anecdotes, the film additionally relays his early interest in photography and the creative community he fell in with. “I was just kind of messing around with the idea of being a stylist, and I saw his journal,” his friend and collaborator, Havana Laffitte. “I suggested [then] we do a project together.”
“He had two very big, destroyed journals,” says Davide’s mother, the photographer Francesca Sorrenti. “They weren‘t private. When friends came over, they were going through them. They were very based on his friendships.” Born with a rare blood disorder called thalassemia, Davide died in 1997, aged 20; his journals, as a result, speak uniquely to how he saw and engaged with the world, embodying the same energy that Sorrenti and others remember on screen (“He was a juvenile delinquent angel,” she says affectionately). Now the journals are being released, starting with Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 01 1994-1995, edited by his mother and published by Idea, with whom she has published three other books of Davide’s work.
“We did the first book basically right after the documentary,” Sorrenti continues. “We were so amazed by the following, and the amount of people that came [to screenings] was unbelievable. In New York, we did three showings, and at the first there was a massive storm that flooded New York – the theatre was packed. I‘m like, ‘Davide, where did this all come from?’. At Dover Street Market [for the book launch] I was expecting a bunch of 40-year-olds to show up, and the majority were kids.” While excerpts from the journals have appeared in the previous books – ArgueSKE 1994-1997 (2019), 2020’s Polaroids, and My Beautyfull Lyfe (2022) – this new volume is no doubt the most personal, showcasing the visual language the photographer applied to those that came into his orbit, and the annotations he extended to them.
Volume 01 is filled with photo collages, contact sheets, photo booth strips, sketches, stickers, magazine pages and scribbles, with the addition of texts from those who knew him. “Davide was an artist – he could draw, paint. Of course, he was a graffiti writer. The journals were something that he saw his brother do – I guess Mario is the one that inspired him to start,” says Sorrenti, reflecting on the connection between Davide and his older brother, the photographer Mario Sorrenti (his sister Vanina is also a fashion photographer).
“It was just the way his brain worked. Whatever he did went into his diary along with his daily life,” she adds. “There was no rhyme or reason. I remember once seeing that he did stuff in the back of the book and not in the front.” Naturally echoing his interests, the book’s pages, like a classic diary, marry various components of his life – for Davide, this meant the masthead of a magazine featuring Sorrenti, ‘Portrait of Mommy (Interview)’ handwritten above it, as well as an early shoot with his friend Ryan Jackalone skateboarding in a business suit. “This was the beginning of his love for photography. In this book, everybody‘s very young, and then they get older in the next one. That‘s the highlight of this book, that there‘s a certain youth going on. They’re kids.”
On one of the journal’s concluding pages is a horoscope for Cancer, ripped out from a copy of Vogue (Davide’s birthday is July 9). “It‘s important to pay extra attention to health and well-being this month. A tired and cranky Cancer can be devastatingly self-sabotaging, so be sure to get your beauty sleep,” it reads. “Avoid situations or people who drain your emotions and energy. Taking care of yourself now will help your dreams come true.” It reads almost like a warning, or a reminder, but its presence also underscores the family’s closeness. “My whole house is water,” enthuses Sorrenti. “Mario is a Scorpio, I‘m a Scorpio. Vanina is a Pisces, my husband is a Pisces … We used to say ‘the house of floating water’.”
Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 01 1994–1995 is published by Idea and is out now.
