| Sante´s father: Italian immigrant, barber, ´50s pinups hanging from the mirrors at the shop. Sante, 17, a small room in Brooklyn drawing his father’s face, obsessively, minutely, lead pencil, two laborious months to finish the tiny drawing, photo-like resemblance. He hangs it over his bed. Sante, 19, solitary spring months in Coney Island. Camera on a tripod, set in front of the great aquarium. Seminal wait for the white whales’ mating time. Large brush strokes of white, the great bodies touching each other, a sense of achievement, belonging to a craft and to a moment. Sante, fashion photographer, American-Italian. |  |
A Very Red Cherry – Francesco Clemente
The following is from the foreword of A Private View (1998)
Sante´s father: Italian immigrant, barber, ´50s pinups hanging from the mirrors at the shop. Sante, 17, a small room in Brooklyn drawing his father’s face, obsessively, minutely, lead pencil, two laborious months to finish the tiny drawing, photo-like resemblance. He hangs it over his bed.
Sante, 19, solitary spring months in Coney Island. Camera on a tripod, set in front of the great aquarium. Seminal wait for the white whales’ mating time. Large brush strokes of white, the great bodies touching each other, a sense of achievement, belonging to a craft and to a moment.
Sante, fashion photographer, American-Italian. More Italian than American. Unafraid of excessive, complacent prettiness. Catholic celebration of the flesh. Still, the ripeness of a very red cherry shall imply a melancholic acknowledgement of fragility. Sante´s acceptance of his subjects´ good looks is without apology, faithful as he is to the essence of photography a vanitas, a ghostly reminder that the sole beauty we know is fleeting beauty.
Sante, now older, successful, and working at the vast magazine icon factory. After the job is done, not knowing whether to feel skeptical or sentimental, he pastes methodically on his diary’s pages the backstage sweat of unreachable beauties, actors, models, rock stars, who, unpackaged, reveal at times an endearing anxiety, slipping unawares through the brittle surfaces of fragility.
Sante, 40, disenchanted with the 60s, easy recipes of self-destruction, and yet looking out through the 90s for the people who express a sense of danger, a friction if not a break with the ever-growing mantle of hypocrisy.
Sante is a friend, a photographer, no explanation really needed. Restless, unpretentious photographs are entertainment too, to catch the moment. The picture will compose itself speak for itself.
Sante D’Orazio
A moment in time stands still, a single image frozen forever never to be again. The spirit remains, two friends on the beach, a beautiful nude and a portrait of time. It’s where vanitas later meets gravitas, when time really becomes its subject.
Does a renaissance portrait by Raphael differ much from a portrait of Marilyn by Avedon? Not really, only in execution maybe. Ultimately they are memento mori well depicted from the hands and vision of an artist. The styles may change but the eyes remain the same. We can use symbols or a straight snap shot, ultimately it’s our attempt to live forever and cheat death, no different than the graffiti found all over the world throughout history. “Kilroy was here,” whether written in 2006 or 2006 BC, the attempt to cheat death and note our existence.
I would love to have seen a photo of Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. Would love to have looked at their form and in their eyes. Just to know if anything they were as vulnerable as me. It also makes me happy to see the portraits of Man Ray. He and Marcel Duchamp in drag! I love the spirit and balls to laugh and to keep that laugh going till time do us part, but knowing that, that laugh will continue way beyond me.
Is the portrait only of the subject, of course not? It also becomes a self-portrait of the person taking it. As all art does, subject and artist depict one another at the same time. Knowing the moment when to snap the picture is also a moment of self-recognition, you see yourself in your subject’s eyes and everything you do is a self-portrait.
Then time moves on and that moment exists no more but you managed to capture the self through another self and document that moment in time gone forever.
How fortunate am I to have been at that place and at that time with that person who means so much to those people who lived at that moment. How fortunate am I to have been given that vision to be able to see. Yet nothing is for free except the price of entering that void and shaking the hands of time and knowing you will not live forever. Maybe a piece of paper will be left with your name on it that says “Kilroy was here!” and yet like a note in a bottle someone responds and sees through your eyes that you’re not alone and that you belong and are a part of that picture and like Kilroy you too were there and it’s a portrait of all of us together.
