David LaChapelle
THE INFAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER'S QUEST TO SAVE
FIGURATIVE ART FROM THE BANALITIES OF COMMODIFICATION
Written by Vanesa M. Grigoriadis

Everyone wants to live in paradise, but few of us ever make it happen. A few years ago, though, David LaChapelle, an exuberant aesthete possessed of both the warmest heart and most cutting sense of humor of anyone on the planet, figured it out. At the top of his game three years ago, he walked away from it all, turning his back on one of the highest paying, highest profile careers in photography history. He moved into the dense Hawaiian rainforest, onto a twenty four-acre farm of papaya, mango, and coconut trees (even seven different kinds of bananas). There, he created a farm for artists, and other people who want to be artists but haven't quite figured out how to do it yet. Life is grand out on the (sustainable, solar powered, off the grid) farm- the land of milk and honey: he has goats for fresh milk, three colonies of bees provide fresh honey, and a pink camouflage Mercedes which runs on straight vegetable oil. He sleeps in a tiny cabin, surrounded by the bellows of the ducks, frogs, and distant whales that make their home on the land and nearby sea; the main house, a plantation-style masterpiece, is reserved for his guests. A few steps away, a volcanic beach with turquoise water that remains 75 degrees all year laps at the shore.

But this setting isn't the only reason that this place is paradise. Here, far from the maddening crowd, no one can bother LaChapelle, and that has brought him an immense amount of peace—which is exactly what he needed a few years ago to begin his transition from photographer for hire to fine artist. Cell phones barely work in this fiercely private town, and there's only one Internet connection. Mail goes to a post office instead of to your door. The nearest movie theater is three hours away. Life is very, very quiet. The biggest activity can be picking up something sent to you from the port, three hours away, like the several-ton package Courtney Love recently sent him. "Courtney knew I moved out here, and one night at her house, she was buying stuff over the internet and kept sending me pictures of all these enormous stone gates that she wanted to get me," says LaChapelle. "I told her not to buy me them, but before I knew it, she'd called the gate person in England, and left a long message and her credit card number. Six months later, they showed up at the port in Maui and we went and got them."

In other words, it's a big day in town when LaChapelle flies 25 of his friends and colleagues in for a seven-day photography shoot, on his land, something he's started to do a lot recently. Today, cast members include Amanda Lepore, the stunning transsexual and his best friend, and Jesus Villa, a Cirque du Solei performer who holds a world record for doing 19 backflips through 100 yards in 21 seconds—plus Carlo Riley, an intelligent Denver software specialist and a Michael Jackson impersonator, who says that he began to pray as a child that he would become like Jackson in every way. "I specialize in the very late Jackson years," explains Riley, nodding evenly. "That makes me one of the rarest Jackson impersonators around."

If you can imagine it, LaChapelle's photos featuring Riley as Jackson—as archangel Michael fighting the devil, and also getting married to the Lady of Guadalupe, played by model Hana Soukupova in a $250,000 Christian Lacroix couture wedding gown (her husband, mogul Drew Aaron, has accompanied her here as well)—are a mere distraction to the main focus of these seven days, which LaChapelle has been planning for over two years. The other shots—and one in particular—are the climax of LaChapelle's astonishing, multilayered series about a world destroyed and paradise regained. He began this project in Los Angeles, with a picture based on Michelangelo's Deluge from the Sistine Chapel. "In my flood, the flood of the future, the people are escaping Las Vegas, Sin City," he says. "But my narrative from that point is not apocalyptic; it's very hopeful. These people are saved through the darkness, and eventually sail together on a boat they've cobbled together from the debris of the flood—and they reach the shores of paradise."

The paradise that LaChapelle imagines is one of unabashed frolicking, where lovers entertain each other in the woods and Venus is born on the shores of the beach, under a pink-blossomed branch of his land's beloved shower tree. Instead of a Last Supper, Amanda Lepore, in a showgirl's white feathered headdress, gives suckle to a baby for the first supper: "Why not?" says LaChapelle, coyly. "She's plastic, and the baby's plastic too." He grins a little, and then becomes more serious. "The narrative here is that the people come to the shores of paradise, where they find nature. Nature is enlightenment, which is the purpose of life: to become better and become enlightened. This is what this epic natural world represents to me, that concept: Paradise regained."

Sometimes it seems like creating art in the rainforest is a version of paradise; other times it can feel like a long-endurance marathon run by a fanatical perfectionist artist who will stop at nothing to realize his vision. Day after day, the cast and crew labor to create LaChapelle's images, working almost 20 hours a day through driving rain, mosquitoes, and a staph infection that has taken hold in a few of the kids, far from any creature comforts and even a nearby store to grab a Snickers bar. Before the rehearsal for his most important image—a photo of the mostly naked survivors on a raft, cobbled together from the compound's refuse and the town dump, reaching paradise—everyone seems about ready to wilt, tired of the long days and longer nights. Even LaChapelle takes a break.

Then he zooms back on the set and picks up a bullhorn. "I've been planning this shot for two years," he says. "This is what I live for, except for friends and family, which all of you are anyway. And I just want to thank you for being part of it, and explain what's going to happen. You've reached the shores of paradise from the old world. You're about to reach enlightenment. I know there is a lot of nudity here, but this is not about that. This is not pornography or an erotic art; this is about the Renaissance, reminding everyone that the beauty of man proves that God exists. That's an incredible idea, and one that I buy into." (More on all of these ideas later, dear reader). He looks around the set: it's all the people that he knows from town, like Rebekah Kuby, his garden mistress; Nate Gold, a seven-foot-four from a few miles down the road; one of his carpenters and his housekeeper (and goat herder), an older couple with young spirits but gray hair. Then there are his close friends, like Fred Torres, his producer of 15 years and the head of Fred Torres Collaborations, and Patrick Toolan, his exhibitions coordinator; even Daphne Guinness, the style icon, who is spending a few weeks in Hawaii to recharge. "David," she says, "has saved my life."
LaChapelle picks up the bullhorn again, and you can see in his eyes how much it means to him that all of these people cared enough to be part of his crazy art piece; and you can see in their eyes how much it means to them that he decided to include them. "All of you, young people, and old people, I know we all have our body issues, but I just want you to recognize my intentions," he says, quietly. "And I want you to know that I really, really thank you."

After the shoot, LaChapelle sat down with Flaunt to talk some more about his intentions.
Flaunt: How have these days of shooting been for you?

It's been very good, the realization of a dream. For the last couple years, I've been thinking about doing that shoot with the raft, but I was too scared of it. It was just daunting. I thought about it so much. I haven't lost sleep over shoots since I was just starting out. And I'm losing sleep over these pictures, which is really exciting.

Freud said that there is no happiness in life except for the fulfillment of a childhood dream, and it seems that in Maui you have fulfilled something you longed for. What is that?
When I was a kid, I used to pray for three things: a cabin in the woods, vegetarian food (the kind of food I ate in Angelica's kitchen in New York), and to make a living off being an artist. Those are the things that I need to feel like I'm me. My parents lived in the woods in Connecticut, and even after I moved to New York as a teenager, I would take the bus from Port Authority for seventeen dollars to their house. My father was Catholic, but my mother is really a naturist more than anything else—she finds her spirituality in nature, and it was important to her to live near that. When I had a problem, I'd always explore the reservoir system on protected state land behind their house. I would always go to this one rock in a lake, where birch trees dipped into in the water. I'll never forget the first time I dove in naked. I felt like Walt Whitman. That place was my solace, and afterwards I'd go back to New York feeling cleansed.

Why didn't you keep going there?
Well, my father died in 2001, and my mother moved away, resettling in Florida. It was hard for me to be in New York with nowhere to get away to. Then my studio in New York, on 13th street, was demolished. It broke my heart. The least-expensive place to rent in New York became, as advertised, the most expensive condos in the East Village. The neighborhood had changed so much, and I didn't want to be the person who walks around saying, "It was so great in the East Village back then." So I moved to L.A., which seemed natural because that's where you make magic—Hollywood, props, sets. But in L.A. I just continued working like crazy: really, when you look at my life, it was a twenty-year period of hyper-craziness until a few years ago. The thing about being bipolar is that manic episodes can be really fun, and there are times of big insight, where your brain is working so fast you see things very clearly. But then you can't always pull yourself back from the brink.

When did you decide that you didn't want that crazy life?
After my third book, Heaven and Hell, came out, I knew that I was at the end of a chapter of life, but I didn't know what to do next. I'd been working every day of the past eleven months. I turned down a job with Madonna. I hung up on her—it was the first time I'd quit a job in my life. I was so sick of shooting certain celebrities: I just didn't care about the Simpson sisters, or the Jonas Brothers. I'd just finished a press junket in Japan, London, and Paris for the premiere of Rize. Everywhere we went, there were standing ovations, but Lionsgate made me feel bad, like the movie didn't do well enough because it didn't make the money they claimed it would ironic, because Rize was the most critically acclaimed film they have ever released. The truth is I feel embarrassed for selling them my film for distribution—these are the people who did the Saw series and invest in torture porn. Anyway, I was in trouble. I was taking sleeping pills, "waking up pills," and other things. I'm scared to watch the Special Features section of Rize, because I'm in XXL pants, drinking a Big Gulp—and it's full of wine.

When did things start to change?
One weekend, I went to Napa Valley for Christina Aguilera's wedding. It was a three-day wedding and I arrived on the last day, because I was so worn out. The hotel for the wedding was so beautiful, overlooking mountains that reminded me of the ones near my parents' house in Connecticut. And I just broke down. I started to pray. I said, "Please, I need to have my cabin in the woods now. I really was at the bottom, I couldn't go on this way, I couldn't go on with the same life. I really needed a radical change." I called Craig Maldonado, the architect who had built my studio in L.A., and told him that I had to have him build me a cabin in the woods somewhere but I didn't know where.

What happened next?
A few months later, I ended up in Hawaii on a shoot. I'd always loved Maui. I'd been visiting for thirteen years: the first time, in 1997, I arrived on the island on a dark stormy night in the winter. In the morning, I woke up, and I thought, 'I'm in Heaven.' I ran out the door, and I asked someone, "Which way's the beach?" It was so rough that I almost drowned—it didn't put me off at all, I was in love. I just never thought you could live here: it seemed unbelievable to make a home in all this beauty. This time, on the shoot, I heard that there was a nudist colony for sale. As soon as I heard that, I knew it was mine. I didn't know how much it was, where it was, what the name of it was. Nothing. I just knew it. Once I saw it, I realized that the place was in really rough shape, but I still bought it. I believe if I hadn't moved here, I would've died.

What was it like when you first moved here?
Packing up and quitting everything was like shock therapy for me. I spent three months in my cabin in Maui that winter, without leaving. We had no electricity and it rained every day. I just had books. No television. No internet, none of that pollution from gossip or tabloids, no Facebook or MySpace. It was a rebirth. I detoxed from everything, mentally and physically. I realized that I was consuming too much: another pair of sunglasses, another pair of sneakers, an object for my house that I bought not because I was in love with it, but because I thought it would look nice. I had this beautiful plate, an Art Deco glass bowl, and every time someone would put his or her keys in it, I would check if it was scratched. I realized that this fucking object was stressing me out, and what's the point of that? So, one Sunday morning, in a manic episode, I quietly smashed it along with some other possessions. I needed a dramatic ending to impress upon myself the necessity to begin again. Soon after, I was delivered to Cedar's Sinai for a two-week stint. I haven't bought anything in a store since then, except for a pair of reading glasses. There's nothing I need. Everything is just rented, if you think about it, anyway. The only thing that matters to me, other than my friends and family, is making art.

So what art did you plan to make when you moved to Maui?
The truth is that, for a while, I didn't know if I would make any art at all. I thought that I going to just work on the farm. I was done with magazines, I knew that, but I didn't know that I could have a second life as an artist. When I was a younger, it wasn't easy to cross-over: you were either a commercial artist or you showed in galleries, but you didn't do both. I wouldn't trade the experience of working for magazines for anything. I learned how to communicate with an audience by being a commercial artist, and a lot of artists never learn that. I'm a populist: I'm making art for everyone, not just for intellectuals or academics or the art world itself. I like the Keith Haring/Diego Rivera ideal, making art that lives in the world and people can understand. I'm for art that reflects contemporary society. After all, art history is just history, the history of what happened in society at different moments in time reflected by artists.

So what changed for you to start making pictures again?
I realized that I couldn't not take pictures: I love planting trees and farming, but I also love creating art, and once you get a chance to do that, I don't know if you can ever stop. I began doing watercolors in my cabin, which felt quieter like in the old days, when it was just me with a camera meeting the Beastie Boys in Times Square at Nathan's, shooting in black and white and printing it all myself in the darkroom. Creating and making art is a calling for me and a necessity. And soon I began to miss the adrenaline, energy and characters of my photo shoots. One day, Fred Torres, my longtime producer and friend, called me up and told me that there were galleries that wanted to show my work, to exhibit pictures that came from my mind only, not selling anything but an idea.

My life has really come full circle -- I had my first gallery show around twenty years ago, and now I'm showing in galleries again. One night in 1984, after we left Danceteria, I convinced my friend Lisa Spellman, who had a nice loft space at 303 Park Avenue South, to let me show pictures there (I was already using part of her apartment as a darkroom). I showed black-and-white pictures in a show called 'Good News for Modern Man,' and a few months later we put on another exhibit called 'Angels, Saints, and Martyrs' –we didn't know yet to wait a year to have another show. No one was buying pictures back then -- of mine, anyway -- but the editors at Interview had come to the show, and they offered me a job working for them. Of course, I took it -- anything to take pictures -- and I worked for them from 84 to 87, when Andy died. My last gallery show was in 87, by which point I was experimenting with color.

Why didn't you continue working for galleries?
At that time, you were either an art photographer or you worked on assignment for magazines -- you just didn't do both. They were two distinct worlds and you didn't cross over. So when I left galleries, I thought I was burning that bridge and would never be allowed back to show in galleries. I did have some exhibitions in the last twenty years, but I always felt that they weren't that serious: I felt that I was a novelty, and being shown, in a way, to get large numbers of people into galleries and museums to see pictures of celebrities. Even though boundaries have come down a bit, there's still a stigma to photographers who work for magazines and shoot fashion, and it's difficult to shed that. Very little is expected of pictures in magazines - they're just there to make someone look pretty, or to make a dress look covetable: they're pictures that are meant to be looked at very quickly.

You can't possibly think that your pictures are like that, can you?
It's true that my images have always transcended the magazine's necessities: the pictures weren't just about Lil Kim in Louis Vuitton, or a girl snorting diamonds -- they were about an addiction to materialism, shopping as a drug, that need for consumption equated to chemical dependency. So I always had my own narrative going on, which I think that's much more apparent now, with retrospectives of my work. And I'm still exploring many of the same themes in my art now, but they're louder, clearer, and more pointed. I'm not being edited anymore, or operating within the structures of someone else's agenda, which is so liberating -- to say whatever I want to say, which I couldn't for some time. That's part of what is so great about showing in galleries for me, now. It's such a surprise to be invited back into galleries -- a rebirth, and also an incredible challenge, to take pictures in a whole new way, where there are no rules.

And what was it that you began to focus on?
I started to think about how I could shoot nudes in nature, and it was very challenging. With nature, you don't want to shoot a postcard; in terms of nudes in nature, you don't want the body to become cliché. I felt very driven to rescue the body from what I see as a critical time for the figure in art. It's almost like we're living in the reverse of the Dark Ages. Let me explain: in the Dark Ages, the body was sinful and covered up, but when the Medicis started an art school, it became something beautiful. And then you had Michelangelo saying that God exists because of the beauty of man and nature—"what a piece of work is man," as Hamlet said. The body became holy and sacred, not merely beautiful but also sublime. And now we're in a time when I think the body needs to be rescued again. With the internet and porn, it has become little more than a commodity. In photography these days, the figure is really only associated to a sex, or a perfume ad. I want to change that. I want to reclaim the figure from its association with the banal – commodity and pornography.

What about the themes of your work? How have those changed?
I've become very interested in using religious narrative and mythology, some of the most celebrated scenes in art history, to depict smaller stories, the stories of regular life. My photograph of the pieta came out of that: my narrative poses Courtney Love as an escort, holding my ex-boyfriend as a junkie on her lap. I saw that a lot when I was younger: so many people dying small deaths, small pietas, dying of AIDS or a drug overdose. And those little deaths never get depicted. I wanted to commemorate them using the traditional Christian structure, and saying that it is equal, in some ways, to Jesus' death: let's find the equality in these deaths.

Do you consider yourself a Christian?
Not really. Although I have faith, I don't identify with religious people—religion is just story-telling, and meant to be interpreted. I'm more of an atheist. I like it that no one has ever died or killed in the name ofatheism. I believe in Christianity, as it was originally intended to exist in the world. The stories that Jesus told were beautiful. I love the Jefferson Bible in particular: Jefferson's Book is only made up of the words that he believed came out of Jesus' mouth. For him, Jesus is a humble, poetic prophet teaching people love and forgiveness, before they built a church around him where everybody wears fineries and gold. I think the Christian right has ruined Christianity for everybody. And who is the Pope to tell people what to do? The pope going into Africa, and in his first speech says to millions of people that condoms are a sin. If you ask me, that's another form of genocide. I was in Brazil once, which is 92% Catholic, and a prostitute friend told me that he didn't use condoms, because if you're preparing to have sex and you're buying a condom, that's a double-sin. It's just outrageous to teach people that. I mean, Brazilians are going to have sex – in Brazil!
What about an apocalyptic strain of thinking? That seems to have crept into your art more as well.
I do think that we need a world where there is clean air, clean water, and clean food. I had always known that, but now I feel it much more deeply. We all do. So I become interested in depicting the world born anew. I've always loved Michelangelo, and a few years ago I decided to shoot a photo based on his Deluge in the Sistine Chapel, but in my shot people are escaping Las Vegas, Sin City. But my narrative from there is not apocalyptic; it's very hopeful. These people are saved through the darkness, and eventually arrive in paradise on a boat that they've cobbled together from the flood. My idea was to base that image, which is what you're seeing in the shoot today, on the famous painting, the Raft of Medusa by Gericault. On his raft, though, the passengers of a French frigate descend into madness and cannibalism, but here, we invert it so that they are saved. They go through the storm, and it's over. I'm far less jaded than people expect. This is not a death scene: it's a rebirth.

What about using Michael Jackson in these images?
I've been very affected by Michael's death. I had become so disillusioned with the world back in the nineties, during his second trial for molestation. That was about the same time that the Monica Lewinsky scandal happened, and I really felt that we were at a low point for history. Clinton changed the course of history: if he hadn't stuck his cigar up her, Al Gore would've been president and we'd live in a different world today. I'd always thought that Clinton was being truthful, and that the women who came up to say they had affairs with Clinton were framing him, but then Lewinsky proved otherwise. Anyway, I remember talking to the producers of Rize, two brothers who had been dancers on tour with Michael when they were 15, and saying to them, 'Well, where there's smoke there's fire,' and they were like, 'No, no, you just don't know Michael.' But I was disenchanted with the world. Now, I feel like this is a person who was innocent and he was persecuted and ruined and destroyed and tortured to death– a great artist who had given a lot to the world suffered a slow, public crucifixion. His death teaches the world about condemnation and judgment. It proved our society's unnatural fear of anything that's different. He illuminated basic prejudices like gender and skin color. He exposed our need to topple those we once adored; our need to witness the brightest star, highest achiever, fall to the depths of what must have been a living hell. We imposed our perversions on the pure of heart – a modern day televised witch hunt.

Where were you when you heard about his death?
You know, it's funny: I had just done an interview with an Israeli newspaper, for an upcoming show that I was having in Israel, and the reporter asked me who I wanted to shoot that I hadn't. I said, "Michael Jackson." It had almost happened a few times: the record company had set stuff up, and I almost did it for Vibe once, even got as close as to planning a shoot in paradise with animals around, but it never came to fruition. Then, the morning I left for Israel, Farrah Fawcett died, and when I got off the plane I got all these texts that Michael had died. I was devastated. I felt so guilty for listening to and being polluted by the talking heads on TV, for ever once doubting his innocence. It was clearly impossible for him to ever have hurt anyone

Do you think he was gay?
He definitely seemed to be very androgynous, from when he was a young kid: a male and female side and a mixture of both. He definitely had that magic, which is really magic, to see the world in all those ways. Out here in Hawaii, that's celebrated, but in our culture it's not. For him, being a Jehovah's Witness ... well, it must have been really hard. Who knows what he had to go through… The facts are: the music was a gift and it's incalculable to realize how much joy that music, if you put together all those hours of people listening and dancing to it, has given the world.

It seems like you're a very positive person.
Well, that image that we shot today has a lot to do with how I feel. When these people reach the shores of paradise, they find nature, and nature is enlightenment. That's what nature represents to me. And enlightenment is the purpose of life, becoming a better person. I've got a long way to go to get to there, but I'm trying. I'm getting back to basics, back to the way that it once was in America. The early thinkers in our country are so amazing. Jefferson had his own organic garden in Monticello, he spoke different languages, and he traveled more than Bush traveled, even without a plane—he spent more time in Europe than Bush did! Those men studied all the religions, and all the philosophies. I may do a group of photographs of Jefferson, Franklin, George Washington Carver, Walt Whitman, early American figures like them, when I'm done with this series. To live in nature, and with no shame: it's so beautiful. I have three copies of Leaves of Grass here, but there's one I travel with that is totally underlined. I always want to put beautiful images in my head before I go to sleep, and reading that, helps me get there.

Is this a commune, here in Hawaii?
It's a commune of sorts. It's a cooperative. People working out here on the farm have similar ideals and visions. Everyone participates in making the pictures happen. Everyone has a skill to offer, and I've always loved the collaborative nature of photography. You know, a group of people called the Davidians settled hundreds of years ago and they built their own world near my mom's house in Florida. They baked bread and they put on all these art shows; there's photographs of them in these crazy costumes. They believed the earth was inside out and the sun was the center of the earth and they lived on the interior of the earth, like it was a ball. The men and women lived separately and didn't believe in procreation. I look at the photographs of them and the men's faces are soft, you can just tell. This was a gay commune. Somehow, these people found each other, "Let's go somewhere where we can all be safe and make art." I've always lived and worked intuitively. This was a purely intuitive act, to leave everything I knew and start over. It wasn't logical or thought out. I love the idea of writing a new chapter in your life and make a different path for yourself.

So what is it that you're doing out here, really?
I'm just figuring it out. Look, I said that I was done photographing celebrities, and then this summer I ended up shooting the cover of Rolling Stone, because Lady Gaga is so talented, you know? Gaga is really is fun to watch in performance; She's an original, so I enjoyed it very much. You should never say never. I'll still work with certain opportunities from my old life because they're creative and and fun. I can do all of that, and still do my art. I'm done making rules in my life. From now on, I'm doing whatever I want to do.

LaChapelle's shows this fall include "The Rape of Africa," opening September 12 at David DeSanctis Gallery in Los Angeles; "American Jesus," opening September 17 at the Sebastian Guinness Gallery in Dublin, Ireland; and "Delirium of Reason" opens at Guadalajara's Museo de las Artes on September 3.