David LaChapelle (born March 11, 1963) is an American photographer, music video director, and film director. He is best known for his work in fashion and photography, which often references art history and sometimes conveys social messages. His photographic style has been described as "hyper-real and slyly subversive" and as "kitsch pop surrealism"Once called "the Fellini of photography" has worked for international publications and has had his work exhibited in commercial galleries and institutions around the world.
Was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Philip and Helga LaChapelle; he has a sister Sonja and a brother Philip.His mother was a refugee from Lithuania who arrived at Ellis Island in the early 1960s.
He and his family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where they lived until he was 14 years old, before returning north to Fairfield, Connecticut.
His first photograph was of his mother Helga on a family vacation in Puerto Rico. LaChapelle credits his mother for influencing his art direction in the way she set up scenes for family photos in his youth.
LaChapelle was affiliated in the 1980s with 303 Gallery which also exhibited artists such as Doug Aitken. After people from Interview magazine saw his work exhibited, LaChapelle was offered work with the magazine. When LaChapelle was 17 years old, he met Andy Warhol, who hired him as a photographer for Interview while he was still in high school. LaChapelle's images subsequently appeared on the covers and pages of magazines such as Details, GQ, i-D, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Face, Vanity Fair, Vogue Italia, and Vogue Paris.
LaChapelle's work has been called "meticulously created in a high-gloss, color-popping, hyper-realistic style", and his photos are known to, "crackle with subversive – or at least hilarious – ideas, rude energy and laughter. They are full of juicy life.
In 1995 David LaChapelle shot the famous 'kissing sailors' advertisement for Diesel, and became one of the first public advertisements showing a gay or lesbian couple kissing. Much of its controversy was due it being published at the height of the don't ask, don't tell debates in United States, which had led to the U.S. government to ban openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.
Themes in LaChapelle's art photography, which he has developed in his Maui home, include salvation, redemption, paradise, and consumerism.
LaChapelle's images "both bizarre and gorgeous have forged a singular style that is unique, original, and perfectly unmistakeable.
In the last decade,LaChapelle has returned to a focus on fine art photography and has exhibited his work in several galleries and museums. LaChapelle has had solo museum exhibitions at the Barbican Museum in London (2002), Kausthaus Wien in Vienna (2002), Palazzo Reale in Milan (2007), Museo del Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City (2009), the Musée de La Monnaie in Paris (2009), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei (2010), and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel (2010).
By 2011, LaChapelle had an exhibition at the Lever House in New York and retrospectives at the Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, the Hanagaram Design Museum in Seoul, and Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.
In the following years, LaChapelle's works were also exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in LA (2012), the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (2013), Fotografiska Museet in Sweden (2013) and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. (2014). And in many other till now.
LaChapelle cites a number of artists who have influenced his photography. In a 2009 interview, he mentioned the Baroque painters Andrea Pozzo and Caravaggio as two of his favorites. A critic has noted that LaChapelle's work has been influenced by Salvador Dalí, Jeff Koons, Michelangelo, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol.
A critic said'There's a lot of pornographic pictures taken by the young today ... A lot of the nudity is gratuitous. But someone who makes me laugh is David LaChapelle. I think he is very bright, very funny, and good'".
In the mid-1980s, he lost his boyfriend of the time to AIDS, than he relocated to London, where that city's counterculture proved enormously influential in forming his aesthetic. "I thought I'd seen it all. When I went to London, the level of creativity and insanity ... they were on a whole other planet." He was particularly struck by that culture's insistence on originality, rather than copying. For him, Los Angeles had been "the literal opposite". While living in London, he married the female publicist of the UK popstar Marilyn; the marriage lasted a year.
In 2006, LaChapelle moved to a "very isolated part of Hawaii in this forest. It's off the grid, bio-diesel cars, solar-powered, growing our own food, completely sustainable. I thought 'OK, I'm a farmer now.'" LaChapelle's change in path eventually brought him back to his roots. While in Hawaii, a longstanding colleague invited him to shoot for a gallery, which he had not done since his days as a fledgling photographer in New York. "I was really shocked", LaChapelle recalled. "I'm so known as a commercial artist, a big name as a fashion and celebrity photographer, I didn't think a gallery will take me seriously. It's like being reborn; it's like rebirth; it's like starting over. It's back to where I started, where I very first started in galleries when I was a kid. It's just come full circle.”
