In the early ’90s, something in the world of photography was beginning to crack: perfection was no longer interesting, and imperfection was rapidly taking over. In that irregular space emerged Davide Sorrenti, a boy who photographed not to build a style, but to hold onto what was slipping through his fingers.

His gaze—raw and instinctive—anticipated a shift in paradigm. It wasn’t yet what we now call heroin chic, nor an aesthetic in itself: it was a way of living youth without filters, with the awareness that everything could end too quickly. And this is precisely what makes his legacy larger than his short life.

With Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 1 1994–1995, published by IDEA and curated by his mother Francesca Sorrenti, we enter the most intimate point of his creative process. Not an orderly retrospective, but a living archive: torn sketches, frantic Polaroids, messy notes, test prints that spill into drawings, collages, and photographs that still manage to strike us today.

The volume sits alongside other publications dedicated to Davide, such as ArgueSKE, Polaroids, My Beautyfull Lyfe, and the documentary See Know Evil, but remains the most personal. Here, we don’t encounter the myth, but the person: the boy who was becoming an artist without yet knowing it.

Opening Journals means observing photography at its zero moment, when it is still impulse rather than image, truth before aesthetics. And remembering that the strength of Davide Sorrenti never lay in provocation, but in saying what he saw without protection.