Book Description

Initially conceived as a personal project on the walls of Sorrentis New York loft, the material in Draw Blood for Proof eventually found its way onto gallery walls as a large-scale installation piece in 2004. Papering the site from floor to ceiling with layers of collected snapshots, contact sheets, prints, polaroids, and ephemera drawn from over 15 years of work, Sorrentis collection was a unique look into the artists diaristic creative process, going beyond ideas of public and private production. Re-photographed as a series of 8 x 10 polaroids and reconstituted here, Sorrentis montage finds yet another incarnation in book form. Here, the images are both documentation and personal exploration, and the layout repositions Sorrentis photographs in a series faithful to their placement on the walls of the gallery. This gives the viewer a sense of the raw impact of the original installation but also creates new visual relationships between images as they move across spreads, redefining themselves and one another on the pages. Images obscured in one layout may appear fully and with renewed force on the next. The result is a free-associative experience like memory or dreams, rooted in Sorrentis methods but drawing on his cache of personal associations, and the act of perception becomes part of the work. Mario Sorrenti is a New York based photographer whose work has appeared in the publications W, Vogue, and Harpers Bazaar, among many others, and has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Previous publications of his work include The Machine (Steidl, 2002).