David LaChapelle, Loaves & Fishes (from Jesus is my Homeboy) (2008). Courtesy of Groninger Museum
“I remember the first museum exhibition that really made an impression on me,” says feted American photographer, David LaChapelle. “I was in 3rd grade, on a field trip to a Pop Art exhibition in Connecticut. There was a gold Marilyn, the gold Marilyn — the single image of her on a gold background. I memorised the artist’s name, Andy Warhol, and just stared at this image. There was something really adult and forbidden about it that I fell in love with. The application that Andy used, the offset silk screen that left that black smudginess, was kind of dirty in a sense. That’s why the work has aged so well; it still looks as fresh and contemporary as the day it was made.” LaChapelle is calling from the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, where he’s in the process of setting up his solo show, Good News For Modern Man – a large-scale survey of his groundbreaking oeuvre.
It’s a remarkable thing to think of the now 55-year-old image-maker as a young boy, staring up at the gleaming vision of Monroe enshrined in gold, his senses awakened, his imagination ignited. It is even more remarkable to know that some six years later — having run away to New York after being bullied at school for being gay — he would by dancing alongside Warhol at Studio 54, and, by the early ‘80s, working alongside him at Interview Magazine. “I’d seen Andy in clubs since I was 14 but I didn’t go and talk to him until I had some photographs,” he recalls. Was he intimidated by the prospect of approaching his hero? “No, I just asked if I could work for him and showed him my work. I was very excited, of course, but all my life I’ve had this sense of, ‘Yeah this is supposed to happen’.
David LaChapelle, We Are Blessed (2017). Courtesy of Taschen
These images are shot in black and white and boast an almost Victorian softness of tone that feels worlds away from the sharp vibrancy of LaChapelle’s later tableaux, peppered as they are with consumer detritus and visions of humanly perfection. The religious connotations they conjure, however, can be traced across his whole output, and provide the theme for Good News (Part II), a hopeful exploration of LaChapelle’s spiritual imagery from across his career. “From the start, I was always attracted to metaphysical ideas, to photographing the unphotographable,” he reflects. “And that’s very much like what I’m doing now.” Indeed, you only have to look to Behold, the 2016 image that fronts both the Taschen tome and the Groninger exhibition poster, to understand what he means. Here, a bearded figure, painted a bold cerulean blue, stands before a backdrop of rainforest foliage, his head encircled by a real Baroque-style halo this time in a clear evocation of Christ.
The early work that LaChapelle showed Warhol — examples of which are included in his new Taschen publication, Good News (Part II), the precedent to the Groninger show — is markedly different to the eye-popping, era-defining celebrity portraiture he would go on to capture for Interview, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone et al throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. In works like There is a light that leads us all to darkness (1983), topless figures, their lower halves wrapped in drapery, reach towards a glowing light source, while in My friend with love in his eyes (1984), a young man with flowing locks stares dreamily at the camera, the lines of light and shadow behind him evocative of a gold-pronged halo.
David LaChapelle, Behold (2017). Courtesy of Groninger Museum
It was during the devastating AIDS epidemic in the ’80s that LaChapelle first began to explore ideas of faith within his work, he explains, in a search for some greater meaning beyond this mortal coil. “The East Village in the ’80s, before AIDS, was like utopia,” he says with audible nostalgia.“As long as you had something to bring to the party, you were interesting in someway, nobody cared if you were gay or straight, black or white or whatever you were. Then this incredibly dark cloud came over us, this plague. It really was the best of times, but like the tale of two cities, it was also the worst of times.” It was then — with so many of his friends dying around him and convinced that he himself had the disease — that the photographer says he began thinking about the soul and life after death, and how he might depict such themes within his work.
The uncertainty surrounding his own lifespan (“It was terrifying — I didn’t get tested for 15 years,” he explains) coupled with the increasing demand for his work as he moved to London and began to work in colour, sparked a period of non-stop productivity for LaChapelle. “There was suddenly an urgency to everything,” he says. Nevertheless, it took some time for the world to get used to his explosive new palette. “My photographs were so the opposite of what was everything that was happening — Herb Ritts, Peter Lindberg, Ellen Von Unwerth — that it was really shocking when people first saw them. So at first I had agents telling me, ‘You use too many colours!’” he explains. “I didn’t really think about it, it was just a reaction to everything being so black and white or degraded, desaturated.”
David LaChapelle, My Own Marilyn (2002); My Own Liz (2007). Courtesy of Groninger Museum
By the ‘90s, however, LaChapelle was the go-to celebrity portraitist, capturing anyone who was anyone in his highly saturated, celebratory yet satirical style. He worked in close collaboration with Madonna during her Ray of Light years (before firing her for being too demanding), captured a young Leonardo DiCaprio covered in pin-up-girl playing cards, a nude Lil’ Kim stamped from head to toe with the Louis Vuitton logos and his longtime muse Pamela Anderson in all kinds of scenarios. He even did a (rather demure) photo shoot with Hillary Clinton, all the while directing music videos — for Mariah Carey, Gwen Stefani, Kelis and more — and producing adverts for everyone from Coca Cola to Diesel.
Throughout this prolific time — which continued until 2008 — LaChapelle continued imbue his work with Biblical overtones, merging divinity with decadence to memorable effect; think: a haloed, silk-swathed Tupac Shakur lying cross-legged on the floor or Michael Jackson draped in the arms of a Jesus-like figure in an elaborate recreation of the Deposition. But as time went on he grew tired of the inherent consumerism at the heart of pop culture, and his work grew more satirical and ominous with titles such as God Help Us (2008). “I had a lot of fun with the magazine work,” he told GUP magazine last year, “I love those pictures, but I stopped believing this idea that happiness comes with the next purchase. Materialism just got to be too much… I think that’s what happens when you try to replace this idea of a higher power, or God; if you just take it away you have an emptiness, a vacuum, and people fill it with material things.” It was this burgeoning disenchantment with the industry that finally pushed LaChapelle to breaking point, prompting his retreat to a farm in Hawaii, where he remained from 2008 until 2017.
David LaChapelle, We Forgave Deeply, Then Love Flooded Our Hearts (2017). Courtesy of Groninger Museum
Since this withdrawal form the public eye, the photographer has dedicated himself to the realm of fine art, creating works that brim with religious or mystical references — his latest series, New World, for instance, is described in the Groninger show as a “future quest for paradise”. For LaChapelle, spreading such messages of hope and redemption has become increasingly important in our anxiety-riddled digital era. “All religions are like guides for living — they are alike in many ways — rivers of truth, leading to the same oceans,” he writes in the accompanying credit sheet for Good News (Part II). Many in the art world have been scathing about his recent output, but LaChapelle’s a dab hand when it comes to navigating controversy. “I just do what I like,” he says with a laugh.“It always takes about five years for people to really accept what I’m doing; I’ve found that my whole career — they always want what I did five or ten years ago.”
He has good reason to be cheerful, the completion of his Taschen tomes last year marked the end of a ten-year process of sifting through his archive, while the Groninger show is a welcome chance to show off the fruits of his labour on a large scale. “This is how I want my work to be seen,” he enthuses.“The clarity of the image, and of the concepts, really comes through and when I touch people through an image, without words, that to me is the ultimate.” And so our interview comes neatly full-circle as I picture the inevitable hoards of children visiting his exhibition, one of whom might just be inspired to go onto such great things.
Good News for Modern Man is at Groninger Museum until October 28, 2018. Good News (Part II) is available now, published by Taschen.