Davide Sorrenti

In November 2018 film maker Charles Curran released a documentary film called See Know Evil on the life, work and death of David SorrentiTemplate:Https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8755156/?ref =nv sr srsg 0. The film traces David's birth in Italy, move to New York and his photography. David's work is intertwined with his friends and youthful exploits. November 2019 Francesca Sorrenti, David's mother, released Davide Sorrenti ArgueSKE 1994 – 1997, a retrospective of his work.

On February 4, 1997, Davide died of a kidney ailment, possibly caused by a combination of his illness and his excessive heroin use at his friend's apartment in Manhattan, although autopsies were incomplete.

In May 1997, President Clinton denounced the American fashion industry for cynically abusing teenagers and helping spread heroin usage to a new and younger group of people. “Some fashion leaders are admitting flat-out that images projected in fashion photos in the last few years have made heroin addiction seem glamorous and sexy and cool," President Clinton stated. “And as some of the people in those images start to die now, it's become obvious that is not true. The glorification of heroin is not creative, it's destructive. It's not beautiful, it is ugly. And this is not about art, it's about life and death. And glorifying death is not good for any society."

Davide Sorrenti's death caused the fashion industry to declare heroin chic improper and passé, and by summer 1997 a new healthy look was introduced on its magazine spreads. Jaime King went to rehabilitation the following year for her addictions to heroin and alcohol.

Davide's career started almost as soon as he learned how to handle a camera in 1994. His mother Francesca recalls that every day was a photo shoot for Davide. He documented everything he and his friends did, making them feel that something big was about to happen. In a series of snapshots published in Interview 1996, his friends from SKE are portrayed hanging out in a run-down apartment, watching TV and smoking pot. His photos also got published in magazines like Detour, Surface, Ray Gun and i-D, all of them proponents of heroin chic, and shot campaign photos for the Japanese fashion companies Hysteric Glamour and Matsuda.

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.

Davide Sorrenti (July 9, 1976 – February 4, 1997) was an Italian 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.

Inspired by the real-life subjects of the photojournalism of Larry Clark in the 1960s and Nan Goldin in the 1970s, photographers like Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Terry Richardson reacted against the “phony and over-retouched” aesthetics of 1980s glamour, introducing what they thought were a more truthful approach to reality in the early 1990s. Having started as an underground trend, the approach soon went mainstream when more commercial photographers started copying the style, and with the long running campaign of Calvin Klein featuring models like Kate Moss and Vincent Gallo.