Around 2005, however, after a major gallery show of explicit portraits of Pamela Anderson, things got quiet around D’Orazio. “I had been doing the fashion and beauty stuff and the portraiture and the celebrities for a good 25 years, so I had to stop all the commercial work.” D’Orazio, who had trained as a painter under Philip Guston in his youth, turned away from fashion, he says, in order to return to his more abstract, fine art work.
But his split with the system seems to have been motivated as much by burn-out as by a need to explore his neglected interests. Much is made of the pressure fashion designers face in today’s constant-output world, but as D’Orazio describes it, top fashion photographers are subject to similar strains: “The shootings consume you. There’s pre-production, production, post-production -- and if you have four or five of those a week, they are all-consuming.”
It didn’t take long for his magazine and advertising work to dry up. Clients simply stopped calling, he recalls. “People think that you’re not into it anymore, and in many ways my head wasn’t, I was concentrating on other things. That basically was my commercial demise. After a couple of years it became hard to get work, because I had basically disappeared from the scene. The way it works is a lot of the commercial work starts with editorial work and when you’re not in the mix with people, at the fashion shows, socialising.... It is a political game as well, if you’re not in the scene, Paris-London-New York-Milan, and you’re not seen and you’re not showing up in editorial pages anymore, people just think you died.”
