BLACK+WHITE: THE MASTERS

David LaChapelle has just returned to New York from New Zealand, where he has been working in Queenstown on assignment for American travel Bible, Condé Nast Traveler. The shoot closely followed a photo essay undertaken in Beirut, LaChapelle's glossy vision of a city trying to re-established itself as a sunny holyday Mecca after years of war. As an international superstar of photography, it is hardly surprising that LaChapelle is always on the move. Now sitting in his New York apartment, there's a blizzard raging outside. The tv is playing old movies and LaChapelle is taking it easy "I'm watching Flashdance in a snowstorm" he says with a laugh.

In itself, this quip is not a bad metaphor for LaChapelle's unique brand of photography, providing a good indication of the in-built contradictions that characterize his work. Blatant entertainment with a dangerous undertone. For without any doubt, David LaChapelle has created his own universe. It is a consumer's paradise, a bubblegum world of spangled movie stars, gorgeous muscle men and rampant sexuality, a neon-lit wonderland where circus freaks are kings and fast food rains from the sky. In some of his meticulously staged photographs, the only threats facing his glamorous beach babes are sunburn, rubber sharks and the risk of being hit on by a weedy guy.

More recently, though, a tougher edge is emerging in his work. "I've just done a shoot for Interview magazine in which giant, bikini clad models have taken over a huge holiday resort. There are thousands of blindfolded American tourists and all these models are running around with machine guns. It's about confronting our fears of terrorism." LaChapelle's work often emerges as a personal response to society's fads, fetishes and preoccupations. His picture of model Kitty lost in a maelstrom of hailing hamburgers can be seen as a comment on the twin dramas of bulimia and overeating. 'The Lonely Doll' depicts Sharon Gault as a Rubenesque nude hermetically sealed inside a Perspex bubble. Her flesh has been made to look inflated. Inexplicably, she lies in the middle of a green field, like a voluptuous crop circle left by aliens in a brooding, sultry landscape. Other equally ominous images further explore such issues as the beauty myth, artifice, fame and privacy. "Alan Cumming's Divine Decadence" is an intrusive portrait of the actor in a chequer board bathroom, soaking and smoking in a tub. Wearing fish nets leer he resembles nothing so much as an exotic bug trapped in a spider web of plumbing pipes.

LaChapelle took his first photograph at the age of six – a snap of his mother posing in a glided bra, drink in hand, on the balcony of a hotel in Puerto Rico. Some kids start young. As a teenager, he studied illustration and painting at a fine arts school in North Carolina, but was snared into a life of photography when he took a roll of film of a bunch of his friends naked in his dorm room. He packed up and moved to New York where, as a good-looking 18 years old, he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts. After hawking his photographs to various magazines in the late 70's, Interview eventually published a couple of prints. Andy Warhol's shimmering pop art colours immediately had a strong influence on LaChapelle, as did the lavish glamour of Studio 54, where he was employed as bus boy. His work began to be noticed. In a cliché more common to the hyped-up worlds of rock and film, a star was born. He was awarded "Best Photographer of the Year" by French Photo magazine and was soon garnering prestigious awards for his photographs featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair,French Vogue, The Face, Details, The New York Times and other publications whose editors understood the unsettling impact of his spectacular, outlandish style. Inspired by Diane Arbus and Pierre et Gilles [who also used him as a model in one of their image] and an admirer of the fashion photography of Mario Sorrenti and David Sims.

LaChapelle set off in a different, more bizarre direction. He paid little attention to the perceived barriers between commercial and art photography. In the 1980s, he initiated his notorious campaign for Diesel jeans, and this changed the parameters of publicity. Soon, rival companies followed suit, selling a lifestyle rather than a packaged item. In spite of this, much of LaChapelle's photography can be labelled as product-free advertising. A turning point in his carrier was the Diesel ad featuring a pair of sailors kissing on D-day. "This picture meant a lot for a huge range of people. It was seen in 67 countries. It became a symbol for gays serving in the military, honouring the role of people who were once ignored". Part of his growing fame was due to the fact that his imagery stood out amid the squalid, black-and-white grunge look that was being promoted by fashion at the time. Another factor was that his obsession with celebrity meant that his models themselves screamed out for extra attention. Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Pamela Anderson, David Bowie, and Elton John are hardly the shy, blushing types. He became known for his uncompromising, often outrageous portrayals of people usually treated with the kid gloves. At the time, many of his epic-scaled compositions hinted at the insignificance of man. He created huge stage sets in which ant-like suburban figures ( the good citizens) are punished or menaced by evil forces. The moral to LaChapelle's fable is that it is better to be outrageous than to be compliant.

" I try to take an image that is provocative to me. I want to make myself nervous, to ask myself, should I have gone this far?" The public seemed to say yes. A broad selection of his starting imagery was published in LaChapelle Land , a hyper intense chronicle of diversity that received the 1997 Art Directors Award for 'Best Book' and 'Best Book Design'. In 1998, Life Magazine awarded him with two honors, one in the 'Best Style/Fashion' category in recognition of his work with designer John Galliano.

"LaChapelle Land ended a chapter in my body of work. My next book, which will be released later this year, is a new adult version of my work. Some people might think it's more perverted, exploring a more erotic, surreal, darker side, going deeper into my own recesses."

Despite this, LaChapelle's photography retains its spirit of generosity and humour."It's very good to work with different sorts of photography, to do these ridiculous, twisted fashion shots for underground, avant-garde magazines like Flaunt and I-D, then to make images for French Vogue, or Rolling stone." His "Girl On Glass Table", for example, represents the pinnacle of serene perfection, a pale model frozen in a Swan Lake mystery, with 11 young gods languidly stretching behind her. Compare this to the brash, latent comedy captured n 'Exposure Of Luxury'. Here LaChapelle has created a kitsch haven with all the cluttered trappings of loud mouthed wealth- gold Rolex, brass bed, ghetto-blaster, chandelier. It's all a case of shocking the eyeballs. In many of LaChapelle's photographs, it is difficult to decide which is faker- the setting or the emotion. Part of the viewer's confusion comes from the improbability of the scenery. Essentiality, LaChapelle's approach and techniques are decidedly manual, even though we assume that there is a strong dose of virtual reality.

"A computer is only a tool and I don't like the heavily manipulated photograph. It is really important that what I photograph really exists. Faye Dunaway in a negligee, Leonardo DiCaprio dressed up like a hustler saddled on a white horse on Sunset Boulevard. It's much more fun to experiment, like playing around in a laboratory. So i never take the same picture twice. Expect in advertising. Then I am happy to rip myself off, rather than let someone else do it". David LaChapelle's signature style could be defined as high lined sense of reality. Whether it is his advertising work for Jean Paul Gaultier perfumes, Pepsi, Sprite, Armani Jeans, Citibank and MAC Cosmetics; fashion spreads featuring his favourite English designer Julien Macdonald, Alexander McQueen, Tristan Webber and André Walken experimental films and imagery for MTV, or his captivating portraits. LaChapelle blends the feasible with the irrational. It is a distinctive and undeniably original vision.

"Such images are from the scrapbook of our lives", says LaChapelle, currently working on his first independent feature film. "My whole life has turned into this fabulous carnival of absurd situations- dealing with a basket full of lobsters, covering a fat lady in Las Vegas with blue paint. You take a step back and think this is insane. But every day introduces another one of these dramas. It's what turns me on. Ever since I was a kid, I've liked the immediacy of photography and I've always had this thing for movie stars, surrealism, great looking woman and men, as well as marginal people. My friends are both icons of beauty and circus freaks, I have an inside view of this glamorous, weird world. I don't really inhabit it, I invent it."