Barely Private

Barely Private is Sante D'Orazio's own visual diary, a decade of behind-the-scenes life folded into a photographer's scrapbook rather than smoothed into a portfolio.

Published by Taschen in 2009 in a trilingual English/French/German edition, the book is the second volume of D'Orazio's ongoing diary project, following 1998's A Private View. It layers contact sheets, snapshots, and Polaroids taken from 1997 onward alongside the photographer's own handwritten captions and loose ephemera. The format works more like a personal scrapbook than a monograph. Pages are collaged with mounted prints, torn notes, and offhand pictures of the models, actors, and musicians who moved through his studio and travels. The result is an unvarnished, working view of a career built on close access to famous subjects.

D'Orazio built his career shooting fashion and celebrity portraiture for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Playboy. He produced widely reproduced images of Madonna, Pamela Anderson, and other public figures across three decades of work. Barely Private sits alongside his other books, including Pam: American Icon (2005) and Gianni and Donatella (2007). It is the most unguarded of the set, trading his commissioned glamour work for the loose, cumulative record of a working photographer's daily life.