A Shot in the Dark: A Memoir Audiobook

A riotous, Fellini-esque memoir from the famous artist and fashion photographer whose work helped define the look of a generation. A Shot in the Dark includes nearly one hundred photos, spanning decades of D’Orazio’s incomparable career.

Whether or not you know his name, you know his work.

As one of the top fashion photographers in the industry, Sante D’Orazio played a seminal role in shaping how we define what it is to be beautiful, cool, glamorous, and hot. The résumé of A-listers he has shot includes top supermodels—Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell, among others—as well as a myriad of actors, artists, and athletes, including Pamela Anderson, Prince, Keith Richards, Axl Rose, Sophia Loren, Mickey Rourke, and Mike Tyson. In this intimate, riotous, rough-and-tumble memoir, D’Orazio writes of his many adventures and how he fought his way to the top while navigating a life of sex, drugs, hustlers, and panic attacks.

But beneath the surface of glamour and glitz, we find surprising depth. D’Orazio informs his narrative with artful meditations on the tensions that have defined his career and life: between the sacred and the profane; the commercial demands of fashion photography versus his personal art and his true love of painting; the nature of light and the disabling darkness of mood swings; ’80s glamour versus “heroin chic”; the mystic presence of Saint Padre Pio and the bacchanalia of Studio 54—from cocaine to Caravaggio.

Along the way, the author weaves together a vivid story of the Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up and, especially, of his overly dramatic mother. The author chronicles his deeply personal, often hilarious, and always entertaining journey as he comes to terms with how the pull of his mother affected his many relationships with women—and informs the bond he has formed with his own son.

A Shot in the Dark is a shocking, sexy, and surprisingly revealing memoir that pulls you into the many frames of life.

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“Sante D’Orazio is my friend, has been my friend for more than thirty-five years. He has documented my life as an artist, my family, my father, my children, me, in the middle of the gesture capturing the fleeting joy and intensity of being for the sheer pleasure of doing it, being there, looking with immense love, compassion, and talent. Lucky he was around to preserve an important part of my life and work that would have been virtually unseen. He did it out of friendship and enthusiasm. It was very easy just to be with him. The results speak for themselves. He captured the full swing of it!”

— Julian Schnabel