PHOTOWISDOM: DAVID LACHAPELLE
Photo-wisdom
David LaChapelle
2009
Pages 48-53

I always wanted to be an artist of some sort and went to North Carolina School of the Arts to do fine arts. When I did the photography class that was sort of it- I never finished any drawings or paintings after that. In the my first roll of film I think I had all my friends. I still have that first contact sheet: by the end of the thirty-six shots everybody was naked in my dorm room posing. I loved it! I loved the collaborative aspect of it,

I didn't have enough credits to graduate, so I just went to New York and started calling myself a photographer, living in the east village in a squat. I helped start a gallery with a friend and I asked if I could have a show. You see, I really began with doing exhibitions. Then, later, people from Interview magazine came to a show I had in 1984 and offered me work, and so I started working for magazines. I did my last show of original work, that was "made for gallery work," in '87. From then on it was pretty much just magazines until 2007, fashion and portraits and stuff. I was still always trying to subvert the image in my work, but finally I walked away from all that commercial work in 2007. I stopped working for magazines, stopped doing celebrity portraits and fashion and editorial. I returned my focus and energy to exhibition work, making work for galleries and museum.

I had reached a natural conclusion in my life. I had used the medium of popular culture, explored the track of getting things printed and published. I felt I had exhausted that avenue, that I really couldn't say anything more within those boundaries, the boundaries of photographing a celebrity or some clothing. Through that system I had really hit a wall with what I was allowed to say. It was redundant for me to go on in that way.

From as high as you can go, really-working for Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, Interview, photographing covers and so on-from the top of the game, I stepped away. I felt I had said all I that I needed or could say there. And after three books it felt like time to change.

I had bought this farm in Maui and felt, "Well, I can be a farmer now." I grew up in the country and really love it. I knew I had more photos in me but I didn't think about exhibiting again, I didn't really think that it would even be open to me after my commercial success. But I found people calling me an asked me and one thing led to another and I started showing again.

I made new pictures exclusively for the exhibition. I took everything I learned communication-and technique-wise from fashion, celebrity, and advertising, and then applied it to the exhibition. It is, of course, recognizable as me, very much my work, but I no longer make pictures for magazines that wind up in galleries; now I make pictures for galleries that wind up in magazines. It is much more challenging for me at this time in my life. I give my own narrative, assign myself, and have no need to work within given parameters.

I find that a lot of contemporary art really doesn't attempt to communicate directly to the public or an audience, and that it is very difficult for people to decipher what it means. It doesn't resonate or indicate ideas directly. It requires people to read about it or have somebody in the gallery explain it. I always want to bypass any idea that the work would need to be explained. I want to use just visuals to get an idea across, tell a narrative, have a point of view. Not spoon-feeding, but expressed with beauty and competitive for that moment in a world of distractions. I try to have a dialogue with my audience. It's very challenging and thrilling; I feel emancipated. It was always very competitive in magazines- but now the only person I am competing with is me, looking deep within myself, and I have to keep challenging myself and moving forward. It is a different kind of competition.

My life and work have always been so inter-wined: I needed to have this life rather than the life I lived before. That was great for that time, but now it is a different chapter. I travel a lot to exhibitions, galleries, and museum. It is important for me to help the hanging of the shows and things like that. I live in Maui, but have a studio in Los Angeles and an office and archives in New York.

More is expected from images in a gallery that when they are just published. That doesn't mean that more is typically delivered. But, for me, if people go to the trouble of visiting the gallery, getting physically in front of the work, that is a big thing. Especially in this time when most time is spent in front of some sort of screen, seeing virtual images. Going to a gallery or museum has become more profound. It is one of the most resonant things for a viewer to experience today. But people rightly expect more from that and this is the challenge for me. I don't want it to be deciphered via a paragraph on the wall or a text elsewhere, I want it to be apparent in that image.

There's no going backwards. The freedom is exhilarating and completely challenging. I was physically challenged before by the amount of work expected by clients, but today I spend longer with each image-more time conceptualizing, drawing it out, planning it, and overall making these images is a much longer process.

I think my images have always been big, it's the magazines that got smaller, to misquote Sunset Boulevard.

In a gallery, some images work great when they are large, but there's also images which are meant to be smaller, meant to draw the viewer up close to look at them. Images have scale that you need t keep with. Some should be large, some small- the scale is important for how the message gets across to the viewer.

"Good taste is the death of art," is a quote I like. Taste is really about class more than anything else-saying, "I have better taste" is a way of people separating themselves from other people. I have always been wary of ideas of bad taste and have often taken these ideas and reversed what things are expected to be. I'll take something that is suppose to be ugly and banal and find beauty in it.

If there is something in my head that I cant figure out, I often try and translate that into a photograph. As I work that out, I find out what it means to me and find that it can really communicate to other people. Things that are very personal often have universal connection, too.

I have a huge love and interest in art history. Throughout the history of art, there are these key images, often religious. Subjects like the pieta, expressed so may times throughout the ages, and I wanted to have a go at these too. I have a great love of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a love of beauty and the human form breaking out from Christian oppression and darkness. Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel-that's something I love and gravitate towards. I don't want to imitate it, but take some of the ideas and some of the reference points and find a connection in our modern society, and in color photography. What would these issues and ideas look like today? These are natural connections for me; I have a passion for these artists going way back.

Is the work celebratory or satirical? I think I was both very attracted to the subjects I was associated with-the glamour, the beauty-and at the same time, when it goes too far and becomes a kind of hysteria around celebrity, then I feel a repulsion. I love these things and then a part of me also pulls back from the excesses and the decadence, repulsed by a life where 300 pairs of shoes aren't enough, and celebrity worship takes over. I embrace and am repulsed by it, and I think that comes through in my body of work. There are these themes being explored, and I am half-critical. For an assignment for a fashion mag and its diamond issue, I had the girl snorting diamonds; and then I had Lil' Kim covered in Louis Vuitton logos on her body. Often-times there is this sub-plot, a narrative that comments on it. This comes out more strongly across the pictures in a series, in the books. I had subversive messages even in the pages of glossy magazines.

The new pictures really inform the earlier work because of the clarity of my ideas now: when I am as blatant and direct as I need to be today, when I can speak freely as it were, and not be couched in the restraints of the editorial as I was, with the magazines and the celebrity publicists, those earlier themes are now much more transparent. I am not reinvented, there is a continuation in the work. But I am liberated by not having to sell anything any more except for an idea.