Fitting the scene
LaChapelle came to Beijing for the first time last Thursday. He arrived looking tired, and headed for the China Central Academy of Fine Arts after a media ambush. Armed with two interpreters, he plopped down on a sofa on the school's main stage.The 46-year-old photographer came dressed in a black baseball jacket and a pair of dark red pants. Inside the jacket was a T-shirt of Michael Jackson, the celebrity he most wanted to photograph.
But Jackson is dead and so is LaChapelle's career as a celebrity photographer. His latest work, "And No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer", was used as the poster for his events in China. In the picture, Jackson steps on a devil with a pair of white wings.
"The red devil stand for the world – all the bad things and the experiences he has been through," LaChapelle says.
Jackson's photo is one of LaChapelle's less critical. He is better known for his anti-celebrity style best exemplified in a photo of Lil' Kim being branded by Louis Vuitton. LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963. His mother was born in Lithuania and emigrated to the US after World War II and his father grew up in the Depression. Their hardships made the two wary of their son's artistic inclinations. As a boy, he used to hide in the school art room during lunch. Years later, he trained as a fine artist at North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to New York. Upon his arrival, he enrolled in both the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts.
"When I graduated from art school, I tried to work for the galleries but my works didn't sell well. Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum, someone's private museum," LaChapelle says.
DALI IN FASHION
Before LaChapelle moved to New York, he spent time in London in the early 1980s. That was when he invented a style so intriguing that celebrities were falling all over themselves to pose for him.
His shoots almost always went over budget, but the work meant so much to him that he would pay the difference out of pocket.
So it began.
However, not all his subjects agreed with his interest in undressed women and the surreal colors. Hip-hop singer Missy Elliott refused to dress up as Aunt Jemima, the black mascot of an American pancake flour brand. In the end, she agreed to be shot eating cereal in typical hip-hop bling-bling style. Christina Ricci took the place of Thora Birch as his snow queen when the other actress rejected the offer.
Unlike other photographers in the digital era, LaChapelle rarely turns to the computer for help. In his 1996 "Alexander McQueen & Isabella Blow: Burning Down the House", the designer dressed as a woman running away from a flaming castle. The flames were a real fire set by the photographer.
His attitude as a rebel in the fashion scene helped him win fans in China. Analyses of LaChapelle's works are commonly the subject of papers at local art schools despite the artist being on the other side of the planet.
People remember Andy Warhol, the Beatles and other artists rather than politicians. To LaChapelle, it says how much more the artists achieve in creating a message that transcends borders.
BACK TO THE GALLERY
After becoming one of the world's most prominent photographers, LaChapelle expanded his work to include music videos, live theatrical events and documentary films. His directing credits include music videos for Amy Winehose, Elton John, Christina Aguilera, Moby, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and The Vines. "It's My Life," by No Doubt, featuring Gwen Stefani, won the award for best pop video at the MTV Music Video Awards and LaChapelle himself won the MPVA's Director of the Year award in 2004. Elton John's The Red Piano already mentioned above the top-selling show in Las Vegas for 2004. His burgeoning interest in film inspired him make the short documentary Krumped, an award-winner at Sundance from which he developed RIZE, a documentary which follows an interview schedule of two related dance sub-cultures in Los Angeles: clowning and krumping.
LaChapelle says that Pop Art is an art that reaches people and its methods have changed over the years. But it is a scene so entrenched in the beautiful if hardly provides fertile ground for art to grow.
In 2005, after his last series of fashion photos "The House At The End Of The World", LaChapelle left behind Hollywood and his fame.
"I love beauty. I love fashion. Even now I do. But when buying things became everything, I could not betray myself," he says. A quiet life gave him space to devote himself fully into the creation of art rather than looking for opportunities to speak out in the fashion magazines. Art and business both co-exist and compete with each other in every artist's mind. But there is no clear boundary between them. LaChapelle used to shoot weddings for wild brides to earn a living. That commercial success gave him the money to pursue his own ideas.
"You have to do what you have to do to keep your art alive," LaChapelle says. LaChapelle showed some of his early photos at the school. When one of his friends died of AIDS, he created a chain of pictures of the surviving friends and hung them on the wall. The photo represented the chain of life and death in the young man's mind. However years ago, in that jungle in Hawaii, LaChapelle was shocked when someone asked him to work with a gallery.
"I felt like reborn there. When I think about what I have been through, I thank God for making me so unsuccessful in my early years when working for the galleries, because I wasn't really prepared at all," LaChapelle says
His 25-year career was merely time spent in the school of magazines, and now he thinks he is qualified to return to the galleries. His touring exhibition will come to Asia next year.
BY WANG YU
It takes a special sort of photographer to make celebrities like Lil' Kim, Angelina Jolie, Eminem and Drew Barrymore strip. That photographer is David LaChapelle.
The artist was tapped by Andy Warhol after his graduation from art school and found work with Interview magazine. That position kick-started his 25-year career of capturing the intimate side of Hollywood.
Most readers have never heard of him, though they have probably seen his work: famous shots like a Jesus-esque portrait of Kanye West on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. He also shot ads for many fashion companies.
Outside the darkroom, he directs music videos. He won MTV's Best Pop Video for No Doubt' It's My Life" and directed Elton John's concert The Red Piano at Las Vegas' Caesars Palace in 2004But four years ago, he abdicated that life and fled to the jungles of Hawaii. He could no longer bear the celebrity worship of mainstream America, turning instead to the galleries which gave him his first failure.