The Darkness and the Light in Photographer Sante D’Orazio

When Keith Richards arrived for a photoshoot with Sante D'Orazio, sliced open a bag of cocaine with a six-inch blade and offered some to the photographer, how was D’Orazio to 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 Observer. The same was true when it came to smoking marijuana in Harrison Ford’s trailer or meeting Mickey Rourke at five in the morning for a spontaneous shoot. He was never one to turn down a good subject or a good time. His closeness to his models, ostensibly the secret of his photographic success, comes from “just being open as a person.”

D’Orazio is an open book, and his memoir, A Shot in the Dark, published by Blackstone last year, offers a close-up of his most revealing moments—the salacious and the solemn, the seductive and the sorry. On the surface, the 70-year-old photographer has lived a glamorous life, or at least a glamour-adjacent life. Working for magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue, he shot practically everyone who was anyone in the spheres of movies, 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 among 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 puts it. “I worship the divine feminine. Over the years, we’ve developed that symbolism of the divine feminine through goddesses: Isis, Venus, Diana, the Mona Lisa. And in pop terms, 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 everything that glitters is gold.” Having made a career working for fashion magazines, he understands better than anyone that fashion imagery is largely a deception, hiding a harsher reality beneath the sun-kissed skin and designer dresses.

Born in 1956 to Italian parents, Sante grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by an eclectic mix of people: “Italian, Jewish, some Irish, and other minorities” but also “pockets of low-level mobsters.” Though there was artistic lineage 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. “No one 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.” As luck would have it, the photographer Lou Bernstein lived around the corner, and one day, he asked a young D’Orazio if he wanted to learn photography. At 19, he joined Bernstein’s Friday night classes, in which the photographer taught a school of photography influenced by philosophy, specifically 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 are attracted to because, really, everything’s a self-portrait.”

Fifty years later, he still believes that everything he makes is a self-portrait. Whether shooting Mike Tyson or Nicole Kidman, a fashion campaign or a nude, he sees himself in even his most elaborate pictures. Stylistically, however, most of D’Orazio’s photos are simple: one model, unadorned, minimal props. (When there are props, you notice them, as with Mike Tyson’s pet tiger or the skull held by a naked Axl Rose.) In terms of set-up, he is equally frugal: one camera, one lens, usually just one assistant. His were not the kind of overstuffed editorial photoshoots that read like movie sets. And it’s that 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 shots, D’Orazio sees himself and his upbringing, “my mom being very religious and my father being a heathen. Life and art are one and the same. My father having Playboy magazines in the basement and my mother praying three times a day upstairs, those are two sides of me. I let them both work.”

A Shot in the Dark presents two seemingly contradictory aspects of D’Orazio: the one seeking pleasure and the one enduring pain. He has a surfeit of stories of escapades and daring: getting arrested in Thailand, a hotel burning down in Mexico, an unfortunate drug scam in the Amazon. He also, by his own accounts, has spent time with every drug, at every party, with every celebrity. “The paradox,” he writes, “was that I worked with light, but emotionally, I lived in darkness.” D’Orazio suffers from depression, which he says he inherited from his mother, and as with many artists, creating is part of his cure. Photographing “always helped me come out of those dark periods in my life. But it’s also in those dark periods that I became more sensitized to the world. If I’m not creating, I’m hurting myself–not physically, but emotionally. That’s when things go dark.”

In recent years, he has also battled physical health problems. In his early 50s, he contracted E. coli and was put into an induced coma. At one point, he flatlined and was technically dead. Following the coma, he dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder for five years. Add to that a roster of other physical ailments—two botched knee surgeries in as many years among them. Following those surgeries, he “couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t tie my shoes at times. Also, I was in constant pain.” He was prescribed 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 at 70, D’Orazio says he’s ready for new assignments, though he’s clear-eyed about how the industry has changed and quick to say advertising has “dumbed down” and is not interested in “great photography anymore.” Despite that, he hasn’t lost his enthusiasm or his belief in the power of the image. “I’m ready to shoot anytime,” he says. “And if no one’s calling, I’m calling myself.” The former bad boy may live a quieter life these days—his vices are cigarettes and the occasional drink—but his passion for photography is as fervent as ever. Not a day goes by, he says, that he isn’t photographing or painting. After a lifetime of partying, he’s still hooked on one thing: creativity.

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