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The Darkness and the Light in Photographer Sante D’Orazio

For decades, he photographed the rich and famous. His memoir, 'A Shot in the Dark,' offers a close-up of his most revealing moments, both salacious and sorrowful.

When Keith Richards arrived for a photoshoot with Sante D'Orazio, sliced open a bag of cocaine with a six-inch blade and offered some to the photographer, how was D’Orazio to refuse? Working with rock stars, fashion models and movie stars, his attitude has always been “if you do it, I’ll do it,” he tells Observer over Zoom. The same was true when it came to smoking marijuana in Harrison Ford’s trailer or meeting Mickey Rourke at five in the morning for a spontaneous shoot. He was never one to turn down a good subject or a good time. His closeness to his models, ostensibly the secret of his photographic success, comes from “just being open as a person.”

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D’Orazio is an open book, and his memoir, A Shot in the Dark, published by Blackstone last year, offers a close-up of his most revealing moments—the salacious and the solemn, the seductive and the sorry. On the surface, the 70-year-old photographer has lived a glamorous life, or at least a glamour-adjacent life. Working for magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue, he shot practically everyone who was anyone in the spheres of movies, music, fashion and celebrity in the 1980s and ’90s: Elton John, John Travolta, jon bon jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Willis, Cher, Pink, Prince and Sophia Loren among them. But while he made a living shooting for fashion magazines, his real........

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