We meet New York artist Gray Sorrenti to chat about her archival imagery of Miley Cyrus, and the girls’ punk-inflected creative synergy.
When Gray Sorrenti was 19, she received an anonymous text. “I. Need. You. To. Help. Me. Make. Something. Classic.” The message popped up while she was FaceTiming a friend. “I was thinking , ‘Who is this?’” the now 25-year-old says from New York, where she’s sitting “in a friend’s painting studio that I’ve broken into to just sit in peace.” Years later, the message will be immortalised in her forthcoming photobook set to release in October.
The mystery sender was Miley Cyrus. “She somehow got my number,” Gray laughs. “I was so surprised.”It was 2019, and Gray had already been shooting for a couple of years, slowly building what has since become her unmistakable visual language, latent with an intimacy that makes each subject feel as though their heart is worn on her sleeve – and vice versa. “It was still all very fresh for me back then,” she remembers.
Photography was everywhere in her childhood. Really, it was part of the furniture. Her father is fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti; her grandmother, Francesca Sorrenti, is a photographer and stylist; her late uncle, Davide Sorrenti, helped define an entire visual generation; her aunt, Vanina Sorrenti, is also a fashion photographer; and her grandfather, Riccardo Sorrenti, is an artist and painter. She was born into that world, but stepping behind the camera – and shaping a language all her own – was an act of agency rather than inevitability.
“I always think it’s such a beautiful thing to be raised amongst what you’re doing, what you’re interested in,” she says. “It’s like the Medici family, or shoemakers, you pass along a craft that one day could disappear. There’s no better person to carry that tradition than someone within the family.” She thinks about Miley the same way. “From the moment Miley was born, her mom and dad were probably singing her lullabies. That’s such a beautiful thing. I always say that from the second my mom gave birth to me, I saw a flash, the brushstroke of a paintbrush, different colours. It’s like, you are what you eat.”
“I never picked up the camera intentionally thinking, ‘I’m a photographer,’” she continues. “It’s a way that I use my hands. When I was a kid, I was painting. My dad was going to become an oil painter. That’s what he wanted to do because of my grandfather. He’s an incredible oil painter. It’s just being raised amongst this craft and art and flow and all this emotion. We’re all so sensitive, and it’s an outlet. I still paint, I still draw, I dance. I love dancing. All of my work, I put through my dancing. I do it through photography, through film. I’m obsessed with filmmaking. That’s what I want to do. I didn’t start with photography. I just started with an idea of everything.”
Gray says this as though the categories for art itself are too small for the craft she’s trying to describe. That appetite for making, that creative elasticity, pure and unrestrained, is what first brought Miley and Gray together after that text in 2019. The pair tore through Brooklyn, making the artwork and teaser film for the pop star’s seven-track project, “SHE IS COMING”. For its cover, Miley stands with her arms outstretched like a bird, a Never Mind the Bollocks T-shirt stretched across her torso. The sense of freedom in that moment is tangible.
“We all know Miley. She goes through stages. That’s the cool thing about Miley. She pushes herself and goes through the process. She’s incredibly brave. I think this was a really honest moment for her, where she was stripping everything down and becoming a woman, understanding herself more than she ever had. Even asking me to take her picture was crazy. She was putting trust in my hands and trusting me to take an honest image of her because I don’t know how not to take an honest image. It’s really difficult for me to take an image that I have nothing to do with.”
That honesty runs through everything Gray touches. Even the shoot day, unburdened by traditional structure, became an exercise in instinct. “It was such a magical day. We were just going with whatever happened. Miley had such a beautiful energy and attitude about everything. I remember one of the shots was in the subway, and she’d never been on the subway before. It was a simple moment, but extremely invigorating.”
“I remember we got this sick car and she was skating off the back of it,” she continues. “We were quite punk about the whole situation, about what it means to make art. There was just a good vibe. After that we stayed in touch and became friends.”
Beyond growing up in families where creativity was less a profession than a way of life, the two share something harder to define. An instinct to leap before asking permission. A fearlessness and an unquenchable fire to push their art forward, bound by a similarly fierce, almost combustible energy that feels both feminine and masculine in equal measure. It’s a kinship rooted in mutual recognition: two women championing one another, each seeing in the other the same relentless drive to create on their own terms.
“Something that inspires me about her is that she started so young and she’s still so passionate, always going for what she wants. She’s always aiming higher than where she already is, and I really resonate with that because I don’t think any of this should have limits. You should always trust yourself and be able to completely jump forward. I try to do that as much as possible.” Then she pauses. “She also loves her mom more than life itself. And I love my mom more than life itself.”
Really, Gray’s images of any of her subjects – Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, or Maggie Gyllenhaal– feel like honest conversations between two people, as if her lens is a window left ajar into the secrecy of their soul.
“I like to take away the disruption of this big mechanical object that’s in between me and the subject,” she shares. “You shouldn’t feel it. That’s the beautiful thing about taking a good image.” For her, it’s merely an act of humanity; passed down through the generations. “It’s almost like you’re just blinking, and you get the shot.”
WONDERLAND SUMMER 2026. GUEST EDITED BY MILEY CYRUS. SHOP NOW.
Photography Gray Sorrenti
