Initially conceived as a personal project on the walls of Sorrenti’s 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, Sorrenti’s collection was a unique look into the artist’s diaristic creative process, going beyond ideas of public and private production.
Re-photographed as a series of 8 x 10 Polaroids and reconstituted here, Sorrenti’s montage finds yet another incarnation in book form. Here, the images are both documentation and personal exploration, and the layout repositions Sorrenti’s 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 freeassociative experience like memory or dreams, where the act of perception becomes part of the work. A provocative text by Jim Lewis follows the images as an epilogue, powerfully capturing the experience of Sorrenti’s photographs in words.
Mario Sorrenti is a New York based photographer whose work has appeared in the publications W, Vogue, and Harper’s 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).
Draw Blood for Proof: Mario Sorrenti
Steidl/Dangin
First Edition 2013
328 pages (8 page signature)
46.6 x 29.5 cm / 11.6 x 18.4 in
155 images
Four-colour process
Hardcover wrapped with fabric + dust jacket
€ 98.00 / £ 78.00 / US$ 128.00
ISBN 978-3-86930-303-1
