MARIO SORRENTI: Draw Proof Of Blood

In today's media landscape, a book review is often a slap on the back. A handshake among colleagues that says, “well done.” But we have never been afraid to offer critique when critique is due. In our print section Berlin Reviews, we've always tried to take the propositions of a book seriously and push them to their extremes.

Archive Berlin Review from our issue #25.

It is a vivid account of the first 10 years of photographer MARIO SORRENTI’s life and work. The more than 1,000 photographs reproduced in the book on a one-to-one scale are snapshots, contact sheets, prints, and polaroids that originated as montages on the walls of Sorrenti’s New York loft. Where one might expect the high-gloss Ekta- chrome-like finish of fashion stories that Sorrenti has published in magazines like Vogue and W, instead there’s rooftop mischief, adolescent excitement and uncertainty, love, sex, landscapes, children being born, and ghosts being remembered as people. It’s a haptic display, not of life behind or in front of the camera, but of life with and around a camera.

They’re not images but photographs, and they implore to be smelled, touched, burned, or treasured. Composed directly on a wall, their dividing lines are as unclear as those of the people and places in them. In this sense, Draw Blood for Proof exhibits the best kind of photographic materialism, in which the message is not the medium but the messiness. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time,” Sorrenti explains. “I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.”

Draw Proof for Blood is published by steidldangin (Göttingen, 2013).