The New York Times, The Moment Blog
By Ben Widdicombe


David LaChapelle is using the language he developed as a commercial photography superstar to tell new stories as a fine artist. His latest work, a single large-format image titled "The Rape of Africa," is an allegorical mash-up that makes references to Botticelli and continues his longtime collaboration with the model Naomi Campbell. Days before his new show at the David DeSanctis Gallery in Los Angeles, where LaChapelle will attend the Sept. 12 opening, he spoke with The Moment about his latest project.


Q.
So you're in showing in Mexico right now? What do they think of your work down there?


A.
I'm in Guadalajara, having an exhibition and giving a lecture at the university. It's a lot of new work from the last three years then a bit of a retrospective, a small selection of older pieces. They go crazy over here — the show was in Mexico City before, it was just outrageous, the response, they get very excited — and the kids! It was very sweet. It was unexpected and a little overwhelming.


The new work is based on Botticelli's "Venus and Mars." How did you come to that inspiration?


We were at the National Gallery in London and I just fell in love with "Venus and Mars" and all the connotations and the representation of Venus, the goddess of beauty and love and Mars, the god of war. How relevant that still is, the struggle between love and beauty and war, which is all things destructive. I always loved the Renaissance, and I grew up obsessed with Michelangelo. And I kept looking at the mythology, the timeless lessons that are still relevant today to be interpreted — much like religion.


Your image is about the destruction of a continent: like in the Botticelli painting, children play with the weapons and spoils of war while Mars (the model Caleb Lane) sleeps, presumably after a sexual liaison with Venus. Why did you choose Naomi Campbell to represent Africa?


Botticelli used a great aristocratic beauty of his day for his model. Legend has it that he was in love with this woman, Simonetta Vespucci, and he also based "The Birth of Venus" on her. So I went from there to Naomi Campbell, and I wanted to bring this added contrast between black and white and Naomi representing Africa. There's the legend of the Rape of Europa which is really fictional, because Europe's never really been raped. They've been the rapists throughout history. Africa — today especially with the recession, gold has gone through the roof. So gold mining has increased tenfold and gold mining is insanely expensive in terms of human lives and misery, and environmentally it's a catastrophe. So this idea of the mining of Africa came into play for me, and the idea of Africa representing something larger, which is the cradle of civilization and the birth of humanity. So the idea is of the rape, which is degrading and destroying that which brings us life, which is Africa, which represents the earth.


What is your own involvement with Africa — why did you pick this as a theme?


I've traveled there, I spent a lot of time in Soweto. And it's heartbreaking to see documentaries about what's happening in Somalia, it seems so utterly hopeless. I read National Geographic — it just used to be a magazine about discovering places in the world and jungles, and now it really has become the chronicle of the destruction of everything natural. So I think they're struggling at National Geographic to find articles to balance it a little bit, you know? They're doing a lot of stories on orchids. So people don't want to kill themselves when they put down the issue.


Would you like to shoot for National Geographic yourself?


I don't think I could! The guys who do that, that's a whole other world and they really are incredible — the photography in the magazine is astounding. It's really humbling because I know how difficult it is to shoot journalistically, to walk into a place and capture things like that. That's a whole other mind-set — I create scenes and document the scenes that I create.


"The Rape of Africa" will be on view at the David DeSanctis Gallery from Sept. 12 until Oct. 31. In addition to the print, the exhibition contains a number of watercolors, sketches and collages created by the artist while conceiving the set for the shoot, which was constructed in a studio in Los Angeles.