Photography Collection - News for Art Buyers

The North Rhine-Westphalia Forum in Duesseldorf, Germany, presents new photographs of Sante D'Orazio.One half of the works is dedicated to the priests - photos of the most famous artists nowadays in the garment of a priest. What seems to be at first sight blasphemous, allows to look deep into the soul of the artists: Nobuyoshi Arkaki becomes a missionary transfigured by his task, Jeff Koons becomes the good shepherd believing naively in the good and beauty in every person and Damien Hirst reveals his faith in death and devil and the exorcism. Ed Ruscha, Matthew Barney or Maurizio Cattelan are other names on the list of this portfolio.Sante D'Orazio creates thus one of the great portrait series in the history of contemporary photography like August Sander. His „People of the 20-th century“ were divided into seven groups, among them as fifth „The Artist”. Or Richard Avedon who portraited artists like Chagall, Picasso, Dali, Moore, de Kooning, Warhol and many more in his portfolio "The Family" in 1976 on behalf of the Rolling Stone magazine.Actors, top models, rock stars - Sante d'Orazio gets the elite of our days into his studio.

His photographs of Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie or Johnny Depp are world-famous. He has already portrayed them all, world-renowned actresses like Sophia Loren, Angelina Jolie or Michelle Pfeiffer, supermodels like Christy Turlington or Stephanie Seymour, character actors like Mickey Rourke or Johnny Depp, rock stars like Axel Rose or Anthony Kiedis. The 50-year-old Italo American was one of the top photographers of fashion photography. He has released in the end of the 80s with his photos the cult around the supermodels and counts after Helmut Newton as the most significant photographer of female nudes. Sante d'Orazio took photos of the last fashion show of Gianni Versace. Today he does not take fashion photos anymore. Thus he created the second portfolio of the exhibit: Scratches. He says about the origin: „I take photos since 25 years with some of the most beautiful women of the world. With most of them I am friends since that time. Thus I got in the course of the time to some naughty photos for my collection. These pictures have interested me always mostly, have irritated mostly, but I would never have compromised my models....“ And thus he decided to scratch the faces of his models on the negative. „I removed their identity and let the photos only come to life as pictures. When I printed them, I was lucky. The effect was fantastic, absolutely new, more mysterious and much sexier than the original, a kind of memento mori.”And thus Sante D'Orazio double-crosses the viewer with his large-format pictures and deceives him.