High budget, high camp, and hyper-charged, David LaChapelle’s work is unmistakable. Over the past four decades, he has shot every celebrity under the sun in every kind of outrageous fantasy you can think of, dropping them into mise-en-scenes where Baroque romance meets taboo-bristling shades of American kitsch. LaChapelle has hatched Pamela Anderson from an egg, made Kim Kardashian into Mary Magdalene, and reenacted the death of Kurt Cobain with Courtney Love. He’s shot Tupac in the shower and David Hockney by his ubiquitous pool. He’s exhibited in the most illustrious art galleries around the globe and produced some of the most-referenced fashion imagery of the 21st century. It’s almost impossible to imagine what his work was like before he became one of the biggest photographers in the world – which is exactly why we’ve asked him to show us.
A million miles away from his epic studio productions, the sunny shot is lifted from one of the artist’s early family albums, and is of his mother, Helga, on holiday in Puerto Rico in 1970. She was a Lithuanian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island in 1960, raising LaChapelle and his siblings between Connecticut and North Carolina. The artist has often traced his eye for world-building back the elaborate family photo shoots she would stage, which imagined a suburban wealth beyond the humble reality they lived. Willing her own American dream into being, he describes her as a hard worker “who made everything she touched beautiful.”
By the end of the decade this picture was shot, teenage LaChapelle had already run away to the nightclubs of New York City, getting his first big break shooting for Andy Warhol’s Interview aged just 17. His best-known early work, created as the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic began to sweep the city, captured sick friends as wounded angels bathed in scenes of heavenly light. Brimming with the sacred themes and glowing colours that remain part of LaChapelle’s signature to this day, much lesser-known are the countless weddings, reportage jobs and travel magazine commissions which he shot incessantly to keep afloat as a young artist.
Here, alongside sharing his admiration for his mum, the artist speaks on running riot in Studio 54, the wildness of 1980s London and why shooting weddings made him the artist he is today.
David LaChapelle: This was the first photo I remember taking. I was about six or seven. Once a year, my parents took a vacation and this year they brought me along. Puerto Rico was sort of a hotspot in 1970, and we were staying in this nice hotel. My mum had a great body and she would take care of it. She was 40 at the time I took that photo. She made that bikini thing from a Frederick’s of Hollywood bra and put a belt buckle in the centre so it looked like a proper bikini and not underwear. I really love that photo. She hated it. She thought the photo gave a wrong impression of her – she wasn’t a floozy or a cougar, she was a real worker.
My mom did a lot of stuff really well, and looking back on my childhood, one of the things that she did that was really interesting was that she would set up these elaborate family shoots. We’d go to country clubs that we didn’t belong to and places that we didn’t live. She dressed us in knee socks and turtlenecks and brushed our hair. It was very aspirational. I never thought about it until I started taking pictures and I was asked about it. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my mom would do those elaborate photo shoots.’ There’s not a single family picture that’s like how we really lived. It was pretty wild. Me and my brother and sister still talk about it now.
I always knew I was going to be an artist. I dropped out of school when I was 15. I would take my Dad’s commuter pass and just go to the club. Starting at 14, I was living for disco. [New York at that time] was fucking incredible. People are like, how did you get into Studio 54 when you were so young? I’m like, That’s how I got in. That was the way. It was the late 1970s, it was really debauched. I remember Calvin Klein following me around that club. I was with this girlfriend and she made her own dress. She was like, ‘He’s trying to copy my design.’ I’m like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s after me!’ It was crazy.
Working with Andy [Warhol] was my first big break. When I worked for Interview, it was pretty monthly. I really had a home. Andy was really generous, he had a really funny sense of humour, and he was a good person. He told me, ‘Do whatever you want, just make everyone look good.’ After that, I moved to London.
In 1984, London was popping. I was working with Ray Petri on shoots for The Face and my first two weeks in England I did British Vogue. I remember doing photographs of British designers like Galliano, who was still at St. Martin’s when I photographed him. I photographed Michael Clarke, who I dated briefly, and Leigh Bowery. It was just really, really fun, and there was so much excitement happening. Then everybody started getting into heroin and it kind of fucked everything up. But that first year, ’84, was amazing.
I think disco had a big influence on me, but I think so many things. It was a mixture of Fiorucci, Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, and just the wildness of London. In England back then, you had to be original. You would just be driven out of town if you did work that looked like someone else’s. The thing that helped me is that I did a lot of different types of photography.
When I started out, I would do weddings. I didn’t think I was learning anything. I was 19 or 20 years old, Interview didn’t really pay very well and I could live for a year off of one society wedding. What I really was learning was how to work under a lot of pressure. I did black and white pictures and no flash. I would hold the camera really still. Back then, prints had a lot of silver in them, and they produced these really beautiful portraits. I’d print them myself in the darkroom. I did so many different types of photography. I did travel for Condé Nast Traveller and I did more coverage for them than any other photographer. People don’t even know I did that.
I remember being really young, and the magazines would, at that time, want to see all the proofs and they would choose one image. After a while, I was like, I can’t do this. I’m going to choose the proof, I’m going to finish it, and I’m going to bring it in colour-corrected. I remember showing the same picture un-color-corrected, and the picture colour-corrected, and the difference was they’d open the box, and they’d be like, ‘Oh’. Or they’d open the box and you’d hear that draw of breath. The colours were perfect, and it was a beautiful thing. From that moment on, I just got the balls to say, ‘I’m choosing.’
I don’t even know how you start a photography career today with so many people being photographers and all the social media shit. [My advice to people starting out would be to] look to gallery spaces to do interesting stuff. I think the world is moving so fast. When you walk into an exhibition, a photo really has the ability to slow things down a minute. If you can keep that person’s attention for a moment, you’re kind of stopping time. I love that about photography.
Helga LaChapelle, 1970
Image courtesy of David LaChapelle