The Brooklyn Rail

In 1997, Gianni Versace is shot dead; his sister Donatella now has to run the summer collection show. Sante D’Orazio, now a seasoned fashion photographer, is there to capture it. In his introduction, Max Blagg describes Sante’s life as a circus tent where the beautiful and damned dance around his heat-seeking lens. The summer collection is no different, nor are the countless other stories chronicled in A Shot in the Dark, Sante’s frank memoir about the glamour and chaos he’s put to film.

Sante grew up in Kensington (then Flatbush) Brooklyn, which was run by the mob, but everyone knew each other. Kid Sante would sell fruit for the mob on street corners. As he grew, so did the crime and debauchery around him, but Sante was never a criminal and would rather run from a fight. As a teen, he found weed, then pills, then nightclubs, which introduced him to every color, creed, and sexuality. It was also in his teenage years he lost his father, and in the wake of that death, Sante started believing in what he calls “the invisibles”: a set of not quite Catholic, not quite ghosts involving his ancestors. After high school and throughout college, Sante came under the tutelage of his neighbor, the photographer Lou Bernstein. These years were incredibly lonely, and Sante often found himself on the edge, but Lou had a way of knowing exactly when to call and pull him out to take photos. After college, Sante worked as a photographer’s assistant; one of the photographers was his friend Tommy Peters. Tommy Peters was booked to shoot in Milan, but got cold feet at the last minute. Already having his plane ticket, Sante decided to commit all his savings and go to Italy. After bumming around Milan with no money and not much of a portfolio, he ran into a friend who gave him the location of Vogue Italia’s office. Sante walked in and handed over said portfolio—half of which consisted of whale photos from the New York Aquarium—and landed a job. After that, the book continues with the most chaotic, infamous, and glamorous stories from the fashion world of the eighties and nineties.

Sante’s immense love for his craft comes through in these tales. But we also get let into some of the difficult-to-describe moments of photography, which can feel supernatural. One night, Sante got a 5 a. m. call from his good friend Mickey Rourke telling Sante to come take photos of him in Little Italy. As they walked, Micky started leaning into a persona invented for Sante’s camera, someone who “belonged there at that moment.” Sante became “invisible to him,” and the character took charge of the situation, using the weight of the performance to warp the feeling of everything in the deserted Manhattan street around him into a backdrop.

The memoir’s writing feels like a transcript of a story told over a bar. The chapters rarely surpass five pages and alternate between chronological vignettes of Sante’s life and crazy stories. There are some moments where the book could go deeper—where it feels like it’s being held back by the necessity for brevity. There’s a level of emotional introspection and honesty that Sante exudes when talking about his depression or his mother that could go so much further if the book didn’t have to switch to a (still very fun) chapter about Mike Tyson wrestling a tiger. As such, the book is half about Sante D’Orazio, and half about crazy situations he was in.

In 1997, the summer collection was chaos. Hundreds of people swirled inside a big white tent while October wind kicked at its flaps. By chance, Sante saw one of these flaps crack back to let in a white butterfly. All that day, it hovered over Donatella’s shoulder as she conducted the swirling madness. No one dared tell her of the visitor. Then, as she lit a cigarette in the eye of the storm, and Sante stared at the butterfly fluttering over her, she turned to him and said, “I know you know that’s Gianni watching over me.” Then she smiled and turned away.

A circus tent, swirling with models, costumes, and celebrities, beneath a fluttering, invisible spirit, with Sante right in the center, is the life you will find within this book.