Self portrait for Dazed & Confused: Good versus Evil 2009
Last year I had the opportunity to interview the photographer and artist David LaChapelle. It was an incredible conversation and although his schedule was tight, he shooed away the PR’s and his minders and we had a long chat about, well, all sorts of things.
Here are some of the major questions I put to him.
LM: What is your favourite image of all time?
Renaissance art ever since I was a child has been an influence. The nudes, the grand scale. I knew at 3 years old I wanted to be an artist; I dropped out of high school to do that.
LM:There’s always a hint of party due to the mad technicolour pallet that you use and your sets are usually organised, tightly directed but set-up chaos. How did you come to work this way?
DLC: My shoots are pretty planned out, I spend a lot of time on the concepts and layout. What we’re doing in Australia is endorsing a product but I draw the line at photography. I don’t endorse a camera brand but this is a camera phone so I feel ok about it. Normally I come up with sketches and concept boards specifically for a person so things are hyper planned.
I walked away from photographing celebrities 5 years ago at the height of what I was doing. I was 40 and wanted to let younger photographers get in on it. My interests were changing. I wanted to step aside and let a new generation step in. My concepts were getting way too heavy for magazines and editorials anyhow and it was all getting intense.
I was asked recently to do another gallery exhibition that took me back to my roots. Now I can sell an idea rather than a product or a celebrity, which is what magazines wanted. It’s a magical moment when you can communicate that.
LM: I read an article recently by the feminist critic Camille Paglia that says Lady Gaga is a sexual copycat who has seduced the internet generation. Her argument was that after the likes of Madonna and Marlene Dietrich before her, the hyper sexual imagery she displays is a poor form of imitation.
I’m interested to know your thoughts on the idea given that you have striven in your career to generate compelling and original work, whilst playing with hypersexual images.
DLC: I think Gaga is incredible. Visually she’s not as sophisticated as her music but she’s getting attention. I’m not 20 years old, I can’t pretend to like that kind of aesthetic anymore and I wanted to make room for others to explore those kinds of imagery.
I have a point to make with using the figure in photography however.
I feel like I want to reclaim the body. In USA we have Christian fundamentalism sweeping across the country. They’ve ruined everything they touch. On the other hand we have a porn culture emerging. Very explicit. All of that is photography. When we see a colour photo of a nude we think, ‘Porn or advertising.’
The body is one or the other, and we can’t disassociate from that. I’m trying to reclaim the nude.
In the past I used Lil Kim with Louise Vuitton as a comment of skin as a luxury item. I used the nude as a representation of what was going on in society. Adornment has always been heavy in figurative art. I want to strip that back.
That’s been my work since quitting really 5 years ago. Showing very large nudes, life size, I realised they were seeing the story and not just the naked body. I felt I had succeeded, no one was embarrassed and giggling they were seeing the story for what it was. The balance was perfect, the narrative behind the story was that the body is more than just a commodity.
Lady Gaga: Now the Wildest One of All, 2009
LM: Tell me about RIZE.
DLC: Doing rize was intuitive. The first moment I saw them dance I said, “I’m making a documentary.” I was very careful that it was classic in its achievement as a documentary. I was rigid about how it would be edited. Let the energy come from the dance and the people. The subjects made that film successful, I felt they were heroes and no one was bothering with them. Not one person was filming these kids. I felt it was my obligation to film them. I was very passionate about the film and they trusted me. They didn’t give into darkness; they gave into creativity and light. None of it surprised me, the standing ovations, reviews, how it flew around the world.
Still from ‘Rize,’ 2005
LM: Do you know of any/many Australian artists, or much about indigenous art?
DLC: One of my first gigs was with Conde Naste traveller, so I’ve done a lot of travelling but its like a one night stand- its hard to form a connection or really explore what’s going on. You have to live in a place. That’s why I turned my farm into an artist’s colony, there’s serenity, beauty, you get to recharge. Detox or whatever.