His Brother's Keeper.

Mario Sorrenti commemorates the life of his late brother, Davide, with a new photo book, The Machine.

Maria Sorrenti, the photographer who created the signature images for Calvin Klein's Obsession, has an obsession of his own. But this time it's not another high-profile fashion spread. It's a series I of images he took of his younger brother, Davide, on Thanksgiving in 1994, three years before Davide's death at the age of 20 due to complications brought about by thalassemia (a genetic blood disorder) and drug abuse.

"Three years ago, I accidentally found these photos I had taken of Davide that night, and it changed the course of things," says Sorrenti, speaking over drinks in the lobby bar of the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. "Finding them has made everything else I was doing seem completely worthless, and I made it my mission to get them published."

This month, Sorrenti's determination will pay off, when Stromboli at Steidi puts out The Machine, a book of 95 photos that takes its title from the equipment Davide needed to stay alive: a small, battery-operated pump he wore every night, which removed excess iron from his blood. Sorrenti's preface to the photo book is simple, concise and heart wrenching. "Davide was a supersensitive boy with an amazing sense of humor, which maybe gave him the strength to deal with his illness, even though I could see the weight he carried within his eyes," he writes. "As Davide grew and matured into a beautiful teenager, he was determined to live his life like any other kid, though the reality of his illness grew heavier and crueler.... His spirit felt too strong for him to be sick."

Perhaps the biggest surprise about The Machine is that the photos aren't depressing in and of themselves. When viewed apart from their context, they seem less a chronicle of morbidity than an arresting pictorial of a beautiful, languorous boy. "There's a lifetime of emotions in those photos--introverted, extroverted, playful, angry," says Sorrenti. "I took them spontaneously We were just hanging out in the attic of my mother's boyfriend's house. But what I noticed when I rediscovered them really surprised me. They convey the desperate need to live, to live life to its fullest, which is what Davide was all about." Suffused in a luminescent, burnt-orange hue, the photos convey both transcendence and resistance, along with the unmistakable sense that Davide was simultaneously bored with, oblivious to and oppressed by his condition.

For Sorrenti, The Machine represents an extremely personal interlude in a career studded with commercial and artistic success. Now just 30, he made his mark at 21 when he ...