ON THE HOB is an Italian espresso machine, Next to it on aother ring is an uncovered saucepan. The shelves above have a few labelled products, and there is a fan heater on the floor, but the room is otherwise fairly bare.


In David LaChapelle's large-format photograph Anointing, we are looking in on the all too typical life of "white-trash" America. In the foreground, a scantily clad woman, in heels, is kneeling on the ground. That she is washing the feet of a stranger, clad in white, seems neither out of place nor unlikely, but the shock of seeing the scene of the unnamed woman in the house of Simon at the feet of the Saviour is palpable.
The photograph is one of six from LaChapelle's recent portfolio Jesus is my Homeboy, which appeared in 2003 in the British magazine i-D, and which are now on show at Robilant + Voena. Earlier this year, they featured in a large-scale show at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and at Maastricht. It would be a real challenge to see them presented in a cathedral or collegiate church.
Each of them is "set" in the contemporary world, of hip-hop and of hoodies, and features "Christ" figures of different skin tones, African, mixed Latino, WASP, and Apollo-like, to reinforce a message about the universality of the Christian's access to truth. The large images are all taken on a conventional camera, and it shows in the details.


LaChapelle is no stranger to controversy. As one of the United States' leading photographers (Andy Warhol gave him his first job, at Interview, and since 1987 he has worked for Vogue, The Face, Vanity Fair, and The Sunday Times among other magazines), he has often provoked audiences.
"Good taste is the death of art," he has been reported as saying; but when I met him, before the opening of this London show, he was keen rather to emphasize that this was a project that he wanted to do to rescue Jesus and Christianity from the fundamentalism of his home country. As he tellingly observes, "The fundamentalists look for a weed in a beautiful forrest of trees."


I was not sure what to expect of the artist who is known for his new surrealist imagery and escapist fantasy studies, but in this self-chosen project I found a deeply spiritual enquirer using his real skills to proclaim the Christian message.


LaChapelle's uncle is a priest. When his father took ill with cancer, he took him to Rome to see the Sistine Chapel that had inspired him on an earlier work, The Deluge. For hom, it is an evident truth that the historical Jesus lived among outcasts, the sick, and the socially deprived; and these photographs powerfully bring that to a present-day reality. Do we let Jesus intervene in our world?
What appears at first to be a pieta is entitled Heaven to Hell. In a crowded and claustrophobic room, a woman cradles a dead man in her lap; the weeping scars in his outstretched arms show all too evidently that he has died from substance abuse. In the foreground, a blond-haired toddler plays with larger-than-life building blocks that spell out the artist's name and the title of the picture.


At once horrific and yet so intimate that it is compelling, the scene, LaChapelle says, is about all the "small deaths" of our day-to-day world, the private tragedies that beset us. It comes as a tribute to his friends and acquaintances who dies in the 1980s and 1990s with AIDS and HIV. The child offers us hope for the future.
To photograph Last Supper, he invited a multi-ethnic group of rappers and other youths to crowd around a table with a long-haired, poker-faced Christ figure. It is not hard to see that they were all listening to Jeff Buckley singing the Leonard Cohen "Hallelujah" during the photo shoot.


LaChapelle has decided to stay away from depicting a crucifixion, because he fears that it is a scene too often lost on jewellers and mass marketing to be seen for what it really is, the outrageous execution of an innocent man. Instead, the single portrait head of an African wearing a crown of thorns is as grand and, in it's way, as Baroque as any of the images of the 17th-century Italian art which we now see as so conventional.